I am writing this to detail my progress on making advanced enemy AI in my game Derek Willks. Currently, two alphas of this game are released and playable, but they have completely normal enemy AI. I am making Derek Willks Alpha 3 with the intention to introduce an advanced enemy AI that can perform certain tasks around their house and when hunting you down, can learn from your behaviour. 

In case you don't know, Derek Willks is a mascot horror type stealth horror-puzzle with a big story and an open world. (I am still working on that open world feature and it will be added in the Beta.)

I started developing Derek's advanced AI by changing some things around. In stead of Derek just going through rooms until he finds you and then chasing you around, now Derek has three modes and he is constantly in one of them. His behavior was constantly shifting according to algorithms and variables. After managing to create that, I posted a devlog to my channel:

After having done that, there was a big problem in the AI where code would overlap and he would do some things that he was supposed to do in another room. This lead to weird and glitchy behavior from Derek and confusion from those who saw it. This couldn't go on! I spent almost a month just staring at the code and making different plans on how to fix it, but nothing worked. Finally I found a way to fix it! I made it so Derek's tasks scripts always reset at the end of a chore. From then on, no scripts overlapped and Derek's AI worked fine.

Now that the fundamental issues in Derek's AI were fixed, I was willing to take the next step in the making of the AI. I created many more tasks for Derek to do around the house. Here are some:

After this, I got my friend to playtest the game and noticed that we didn't see Derek at all during the gameplay. Every time we were somewhere, Derek was doing his chore somewhere else far away. This actually kinda made me sad because I had been working on this AI for so long. I decided I needed to fix this

And here I am now. I am thinking of fixing this AI by adding some points where it recognizes your position and goes to do a chore that is close to you. I also plan to add more noise makers around the house for the AI to hear you.

When this is all done and I have fixed the issues with the AI, I will make it so that after getting caught, the AI learns from your behaviour and sets traps in places you've visited. After that, I think this first version of the AI would be done and I would be dropping Derek Willks Alpha 3 to the public.

Thanks for reading,

-Noah Smith (Developer)