*Some of the models featured are sourced from David OReilly’s free library.

At the beginning of the week I finished another player behavior. I was able to polish the looping behavior a bit by limiting the number of “past selves” to five.

Most of this week was spent doing research on artificial intelligence for games. I am reading AI for Games by Ian Millington. He goes over all sorts of algorithms that have to do with movement, collision detection, and decision-making. I am investing time in this research so that I can be sure that I choose the right system for my needs: maybe a simpler system would suffice for the behaviors I want.

Some new ideas arose that can be extensions of whatever AI system I choose. Because most of these systems depend on data about internal states of the character, I can choose that data to determine the moods of other characters. For example, maybe I keep a toll of how many objects the character has interacted with (this could also be focused on a specific interaction, like how many times did they write on the paper). This number could determine whether the convenience store worker is in a good mood or a bad mood when they reach them.

Another area of research that arose for me is the relationship between programming a character and writing a character. I find it fascinating that screenplay considerations like a character’s desires versus needs come into play when designing them as goal-oriented systems. Interactions between the main player’s desires/needs and the AI they will encounter can be thought of as the crux of any space where they meet, determining the potential outcomes of player-NPC interactions.

This week I focused on sourcing 3D artists for my models and on slowly adding each main player affordance. I made a basic model for the first scene which starts in the main player’s apartment.

I intend to use this first space as a sort of tutorial for the kind of interactions one will find on the “outside”. This week, however, I managed to work on affordances specific to the character’s body.

The first one is the mode of transportation. The player can grab the characters head by pressing the trigger and positioning one or both controllers on the head. Then, they can throw it and wherever it lands the user will teleport.

The other functionality consists in the “self-awareness” exercise which records the player’s movements, loops them, and respawns the player in another location. The result is a room full of “past selves.”

Right now the script is working for just the head, new complications arrive when you add a body with an IK. This I will finish in the coming week.

This week, I wrote the script for what I formerly referred to as A Glitch in Three Acts. The thematic remains the same, but now it is titled Earl Grey Lavender Tea. The experience is about a businessman, Torpedo Black, whose sole objective is to find and buy some Earl Grey Lavender tea so he can finish some tedious paperwork. This goal takes him through the surreal and glitchy streets of Prague, through which the user has to improvise to adapt and resolve some of these absurd happenings.

Beyond that, I created a mood-board and made some quick concept art for one of the mechanics and for one of the locations.

Below, you can see my plan for the last scene. As soon as the user gets back to their apartment, makes some tea and sits down to finish their paperwork, a “self-awareness” exercise is triggered. The user’s animations will be stored and looped, after the user is respawned to another position. This will happen several times, and the user will be able to watch their “past-selves” all across the room in a loop.

Finally, I researched GOAP systems and created a trello board where most of the assets and tasks are outlined. GOAP systems are a form of AI I plan to implement where a planner class is responsible for taking a character’s goals, decided by their states, and choosing which sequence of actions is better to accomplish these goals. Actions have preconditions and effects. This means that characters states and world states serve as preconditions and effects. The goal of an action or a sequence of actions is to change character states and world states.

The goal of the overall story is to experience where the ordinary and the extraordinary meet. Faced with a tedious task like bureaucratic paperwork, Torpedo the businessman needs to navigate a clashing of worlds (Magritte like characters meet Oreilly’s in the warm setting of Prague) which produces glitches only he can fix or side-step.

Going forward I need to do a lot of reflection around affordances and responsible design. I want to avoid making the story too male-centric, and I would like to play with affordances and expectations consciously. Navigation is still something I need to figure out and craft intentionally.