Summary

In this chapter, we've briefly covered most of the aspects of the game design that affect weapon selection (implicitly). As discussed, some assumptions will influence the specification:

• Weapons have certain properties such as projectile speed and reload times.

• The various weapons behave differently when performing similar tasks.

Some environmental restrictions also affect the weapon-selection process:

• Aspects of the environment's design combine together to determine the applicability of a weapon (for instance, obstacles).

• There are characteristics of the combat itself that make particular weapons suitable (for instance, distance and movement).

• The skill of the players is an important restriction on the effectiveness of weapons.

Finally, we drafted some guidelines to assist the testing and experimentation:

• We need to maximize the variety of weapon use either explicitly or not (for instance, good weapon availability).

• It's important to emphasize the diversity of terrains by using many different levels.

The next chapter investigates the problem of decision making and how human players perform the task.

Practical Demo

The demo animat is known as Mr. Versatility partly as an example of the ideas in this chapter, and partly as an extension of the capabilities of the previous part. Mr. Versatility is capable of using all the weapons in the game, and has shooting skills for each of them. Most importantly, a description of the AI architecture is available online at http://AiGameDev.com/ along with the source code and demo, as usual.