Shining Force 2 Enemy Sprites – All done!
That’s 94 sprites in total.
Or 752 frames.
Or 433,152 pixels.
Check them out here.
Next job on the list is NPC characters, and then the actual Shining Force.
That’s 94 sprites in total.
Or 752 frames.
Or 433,152 pixels.
Check them out here.
Next job on the list is NPC characters, and then the actual Shining Force.
Woah, a Shining Online update! Unfortunately there’s nothing really new in this entry, but if you want to see how the old demo worked you might be interested.
I’ve tried to extract as much useful information from the original source code as possible, but it really was a mess. Blame my youth and inexperience for that :P
If you’ve played Demo 4, you probably notice everybody gangs up on Ken. It might think it’s because of his awesome blue hair, but that’s not the case.
Every time an AI in Shining Online decides to move, it has to decide whether to attack, move or defend (and heal/support if I’d got that far ;)).
The AI would first cycle through every player on the battlefield. Each player is assigned a score to work out how dangerous they are to the current enemy and how likely they are to die.
Scores were assigned based on the following:
All the scores are then sorted, and the enemy has its target. However, not all targets are in range, so a little extra decision making needs to be made. If the player was out of range, but the enemy had high bravery they’d rush towards them, otherwise they’d stay still.
And that’s all there is to it!
The addition of healing would have made things far more interesting, but I was far too lazy to add it.
Here’s a couple of improvement ideas for the next version:
The biggest problem with all this is keeping things fun. An AI enemy is playing to win, but it has to do it in a fun way. Having enemies do a pincer move or set you up for defeat can be fun to play, if it’s done in an imperfect way. This is where personalities and randomness come in, as you don’t want enemies to always react the same way.