There’s a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching your carefully programmed enemy stand perfectly still while the player shoots them in the face. I’ve been there multiple times,…
The enemy guard spots a dead body and just… walks past it. I’ve seen this failure mode in more games than I’d like to admit, including one I worked on…
I once debugged an enemy AI that had 47 different states in a single state machine. Forty-seven. The transition logic looked like a bowl of spaghetti, and any time we…
I still remember the first time I watched a player get stuck in an obvious corner of my medieval RPG. Their knight, sword raised, kept poking at an invisible wall…
I still remember the moment I realized our game’s AI was fundamentally broken. We’d spent weeks programming a survival game where NPCs were supposed to act like real people trying…
When I first started working with autonomous systems about eight years ago, obstacle avoidance was still something of a dark art. We’d spend hours tuning sensors, adjusting algorithms, and watching…
The worst pathfinding bug I ever dealt with involved a door. Just a regular door in a stealth game. Characters would calculate paths through it when it was open, start…
I still remember the exact moment I fell in love with navigation meshes. We’d been struggling with a grid-based pathfinding system that treated our beautifully crafted levels like a checkerboard,…
The first time I implemented A* from scratch, I thought I understood it. I’d read the theory, seen the pseudocode, understood the concept of f = g + h. Then…
There’s a special kind of frustration that comes from watching your carefully crafted enemy soldier get stuck on a doorframe, shuffling back and forth like they’re doing some bizarre dance.…
Mastan