Tonight I got a brief taste of developing the AI for my jellyfish for the Feeding Frenzy level (the equivalent of the ghosts for Pac Man). Browsing the web for the topic, I found that there was a lot more to the Pac-Man ghosts than I realized. I did not know that they each had their own personalities and behaviors.
- The first ghost will move following to a pre-programmed pattern of
movements through the maze (e.g. right, up, left, down, left, ...).
This pattern is always the same for a level.
- The second ghost (the red one) moves using a pathfinder routine, trying
to minimize x/y-distance to the pacman (this we described earlier as
"strategic movement")
- The third ghost moves on pure random
- The fourth ghost uses another pathfinder routine, trying to predict the
next movements of the pacman (trying to intercept him)
While I found all the reading fascinating, I don't plan on incorporating all of this logic in my small scale version. After the contest is over, I might come back to revisit this just to see if I can reproduce the same different types of personalities into my jellyfish.
For now, I'm just sticking with 2 types of AI personalities. The one is just random. The jellyfish will move in one direction until it encounters an opening and then it will randomly choose which way to go each time it encounters an opening. The second personality is similar to the first with the added parameter of figuring out which path takes him towards Bob's current position.
So I speak of the AI personalities of the Jellyfish, like I've already whipped up the code for them and they are merrily chasing Bob through the maze, but the truth is I haven't even begun to code them. Why didn't I just start coding them tonight and then share the results with you my faithful readers reader? I might have just got a wee bit distracted tonight browsing the web and chatting with friends.
I did work on improving how well Bob takes corners in Feeding Frenzy and that's looking a lot better and I also worked a little on the collision detection for Bob's "tail" of children in the Follow the Leader level so the night wasn't a total loss as far as continued development, but I certainly didn't focus on the project as well as I wanted to. However, it doesn't look like I'm the only one losing focus! ;)