A screenshot of my game, with panels showing the match card and a information about one of the two wrestler pawns that are selected. The selected pawns are glowing to show they are selected.

Ringside Booker: Entrances and AI

Adam Courtney

Happy new year! 🙂

I have had a draft of this post for a few weeks, and feel like I’ve hit a point where what I’m saying won’t change the next day!

The main focus this month has been AI – mostly just the weird linkage between match card logic and characters. I have had to explore questions like:

  • Why does Bill keep walking away from the ring?
  • Why does Bill not stay in the ring?
  • Why does Bill stand next to the ring and stare at it?
  • Why does Bill staring at the ring gobble up my framerate?

Now that these questions have been answered, I’ve got some nice ideas on systems, and how the thing holds up. Most of it was just plain old Adam errors – the characters are only as good as I code them to be. 🙂

The good news

The Guid and records system holds up remarkably well! 🙂 I’m now officially using it for something other than pretty inspector UI, and am able to let winning wrestlers celebrate like the primadonnas they are, while the losers take a walk of shame up the entrance ramp. I am also able to get wrestlers to wait patiently for each team to enter together. This will pay off hugely when I add tag matches, and staggered entry to matches and gauntlet matches and…

The bad news

I have had a great many ideas. I plan to keep scope as it is and just note “would be cool” features for now. One exception is the goal-based AI system. I think that’s important, and was always in mind as a goal. I want to make a game with hungry wrestlers!

Wrestler Ryback hoists Dolph Ziggler on his shoulders to deliver his finishing maneuver Shell Shocked during the April 7, 2014 episode of WWE Raw.
FEED ME MORE! (He’s a hungry wrestler, which makes this an excellent joke) Image courtesy of Miguel Discart, whose flickr page is https://www.flickr.com/photos/miguel_discart/ Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

It is pretty similar in ideas to the Simple Happy House weekend project I did a while ago, so I’m hoping things will come back to me when I look at the code I wrote before. 🙂

Next steps

I plan to get this side of AI logic cemented down, possibly tighen up pathfinding if possible. Once a first pass of the “simulator” end has been done, I plan to look at the booking side and play with getting matches booked in AI. This part could be a pain, but I’m hoping it’ll be similar to my past work. 🙂

Thank you for reading! 🙂

Ryback joke image courtesy of Miguel Discart, 2014

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