During the beginning of development for Lamina Island, one of the ideas that was kicked around was the idea of having a ‘desire system’ to give the player something they’d have to pay attention to. The desire system was also supposed to give the AI something entertaining to be doing while you were just sitting around, as this was before combat was
In this desire system the goal was that the animal would eat when they are hungry & look for entertainment when they were satisfied with their desires. The idea was to have something similar to the Sims’s need system.
You can read up on their system here, which is way more advanced that what we were going for with the desire system.
To test that the AI would actually go around and ‘do things’ a test environment was set up with cubes to represent something that gives entertainment and something else that gives food.
Once it was proven that the basics of the AI worked, we had to figure out if it would be entertaining. So our test scene got a little bit of an upgrade, and what we ended up with was spiders who kicked soccer balls.
While the end result did end up being entertaining, we did not keep the desire system in the game because it didn’t end up fitting with the rest of the game’s features, and gave the game the wrong feeling. But it was an interesting system to develop, and it might end up being implemented in a future game project.
