Comment on 4D Salmon

• Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I have some similar ideas about a story driven time travel game where it’s set up so that at one point you face an anonymous enemy, which forces you to trigger certain conditions in the stage and then they escape.

  Later in the game you return to this stage at the same point in time, expecting to face that enemy again, but you are this “enemy”, and the game nudges you into replicating the exact same sequence of events so that you take the actions which the “enemy” did so your (NPC) past self can replay the exact steps you previously took.

  But the game doesn’t show this clearly to you the player until you completed the stage - while your character is shown to have noticed something strange, the game doesn’t show you the player (or you character’s party) that you faced yourself until the end of the stage, using different positions and camera angles to hide it from you and the party. And if you manage to replicate the event chain perfectly, you’ll get to see your party members being visibly stunned when you see them realize it was a time loop (your actions in the stage breaks the loop), and hopefully the player can be made to feel like they experienced a time loop, as if they really faced off with themselves twice (“how did the game know I would do it that way?”)

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  • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That sounds difficult to pull off, but incredible if you could.

    Not only is a time loop built into the main story, recreating something from another perspective… it also has branching paths in the more linear sense of a roleplaying game / imsim.

    I like this idea too, but …‘nudging’ the player, without it being too estoeric, or too obvious… that ain’t easy lol.

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    • Natanael@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      I can see a few ways to nudge people, like a puzzle that’s more linear than it looks like, or selecting the tasks in the next version of the encounter based on the events in the previous version of it to match (you wouldn’t see clearly what the “enemy” is doing so you wouldn’t notice that those actions the second round weren’t fixed, the game is just trying to replicate the interactions between past/future self and the rest of the stage is completely arbitrary). Basically treating it as a choreography problem.

      Maybe even make it feel more “wild” by recording how the player controls the character during the game before that point, use something like generative ML to make the “enemy” AI act as the game think you would respond to your past self, then when you’re the future you returning to the stage the game nudges you into using your abilities in the same way (altering how you have to use your powers to solve puzzles to match how the previous “predicted AI you”, making you face other enemies and use your abilities in similar ways to win fights)

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      • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        I was going to suggest basically what you said in the first paragraph, but I didn’t want to influence your own creativity =D

        As for the second paragraph… depending on exactly what you mean by machine learning… say, possibly a more brute force, genetic-mutation, run 100s or 1000s of iterations to generate a ‘strategy’ … that may be overkill.

        I would suggest looking into Goal Oriented Action Planning, GOAP. GOAP is basically a theory, a conceptual framework of how to program AI, in the video game sense of AI… but it is way, way more computational lightweight.

        It is also what made FEAR’s AI so distinct, convincing players that it was actually intelligently reacting to them, the environment, and making its own decisions… because arguably, it was, or at least doing a much more ‘realistic’ approximation of this at a fundamental level.

        The difference between this game, your game’s implementation of GOAP and most other ones… would be that it is like, the levels themselves, the sort of plot line itself, the ‘dungeon master’… that is the Goal Oriented thinking agent, not just an entity in the world.

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