Designing creature A.I. & New arena editor
The arena editor, which is currently a separate program, will cease to exist. It will be totally re-written and integrated straight in to the game! Meaning that you can access it easily from the games mainmenu, and the loadtime will be zero. You can edit your arenas and play-test them instantly. This will be a little more work for me at this point, but saves me a lot of hassle when me and Juho start to work on the singleplayer missions, as balancing and play-testing them will hopefully be a breeze using the shiny new editor…. fingers crossed 
Picture of the old editor. Hopefully the new one will be a little more userfriendly…
As for the A.I. implementation I came up with a weird idea last night in bed and had to wake up to write some design in the middle of the night, as usual. Let me first tell about the problem. A.I. creatures (enemies) have to be able to mostly attack player when they see it and collect some stuff. They can also attack each other… but more about that later. They can patrol around a little, but are basically waiting to someone to come to their field of vision. But I wanted something that would give me more control on the patrolling paths or areas. I originally designed that I could use the editor to draw ‘patrol paths’ and assign certain enemies to use paths, so that they would move along this ‘rail’ until they saw something interesting, like a player in need of some punishment 
Nothing wrong with this idea, but it would make the whole arena editing very messy and not very user friendly as you would have tens of paths circling around the arena. Also it’s not very interesting.
What I want is to mix random/flocking type animal behaviour with some control over it. So I’m designing to use a kind of invisible virtual breadcrumbs, which the A.I.’s like. They come in different ‘colours’ and you can place them around the arena. Creatures like the breadcrumbs so much, that unless they have something important to do (fighting or fleeing), they wander towards a breadcrumb they can see. But they also get bored easily, and when they have visited a certain crumb, their interest towards that particular crumb gets low for a while, and they try to spot another crumb nearby to visit. With this system you can build an arena of which certain parts attract more enemy attention than others. You can also specify which colour breadcrumbs certain enemies follow if they do at all. This is all just a theory right now… I’ll have to see how this might or might not work….