Hello, my name is Simon Strange. I’ve made a few fighting games in my day, and hope to make a few more.
I just pledged on fig for early access, as I’m keen to play Fantasy Strike. I saw that one of the future features to work on is improved AI.
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I would love to do this, if there isn’t already an internal development member chomping at the bit to get at it. I presume there is already a rudimentary AI, which means probably all that’s needed is an abstract state machine to represent all of the interesting situations, taking into account each matchup’s specific qualities, and then some tunable weightings to select actions and goals from moment to moment. I imagine this would work best if those tuable parameters were in a plain-text file, so enterprising folks could try out small adjustments and help with ongoing AI balance.
Maybe that’s not something y’all want discussed in the public forums - for some people peeking behind the curtain of an AI can sort of ruin the single player experience. But it seems like transparency is the order of the day, and obviously my approach is just notional at this point anyway, right?
I’m easy to find - and I look forward to watching this play out.
To my understanding, the current AI is basically the automated version of a cat walking across your keyboard, so if the Fig campaign is successful enough, I’m sure they’d love to have a pro working on that stuff!
Ah, but the “fun” bit here is that David and I have a bit of a history…
We were both on a “game designers” e-mail distribution list back in 2002? I was bouncing around ideas for a fighting game in develpoment (which became Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee on GC and Xbox), and David was… not kind about my concepts. One of which was - I wanted to simplify the inputs, so that there was zero complexity in the execution of the moves - allowing focus on just the tactical differences between the kaiju mashups.
Then we had like a decade of very little interaction, but our occasional brushes were still somewhat tense.
And then, about 5 years ago, I had a board game publication with Game Salute, who was also publishing a new Sirlin games game… and they ended up cutting about 30% of their slate, including my game but NOT including David’s game. Grrr…
So we’ve had a bit of a checkered past. Though you could also say that we’ve had like 6 brief conversations, and none of them of real weight, so it’s a bit of a stretch to read much into it.
Plus, 2-3 years ago we randomly sat next to one another at a GDC talk, and I took a moment to clear the air. So our most recent chat was personable, at least.
