An AI Update

Not a huge ton to say right now, but I just thought I'd keep you all posted on what's going on. The combat balance changes have created some...interesting problems within the AI. It fights like a total moron right now. I'm trying to tweak it so that it can actually make some smarter decisions, but it's a slow process. The core problem is that it's designed to optimize for successful attacks. This means that Rest is now the most successful attack, so when it doesn't know what else to do, it Rests. I've managed to include a caveat for not exposing itself to unnecessary danger, but it's got several other problems. Namely, I didn't update how the AI processed math when I changed combat balance, so it's still making decisions for the old system.

There's also a problem of it believing it has a 0% chance of success on attacks that is...wrong? So I need to find out what's going on there, and then tweak accordingly. I'm also currently toying with the idea of making it such that a roll of 20 will always succeed, even if somehow the difficulty is higher than 20. That was there'll always be a 5% chance of success, and makes the panic AI mechanics actually...useful.

Either way, it's an improvement over the first situation I found myself in, where I added the ability to strip yourself(a move called Disrobe) and then had the AI perform it twice at the beginning of the fight and effectively kill themselves, because it was the move with the highest chance of success.

Other developments include me shifting all of the Shield High character data out of the code and into .txt files like I really should've done from the beginning but never did because I'm an idiot. It's had some hiccups and resulted in some changes to the opening of the game, but it should make the game better to develop for myself in the future, and potentially open up the possibility of people adding their own characters, or just fucking about with the existing ones to make them stronger/weaker/have different scenes.

That's all for now! No clue when this'll all be ready for a proper release, but hopefully soon-ish. Sometime between now and then I plan to set up a Discord server, with some form of bonus for Patrons, I'm not yet sure what though. I'll have to actually look at Patreon's integration and stuff.

Until next time!

Pudding Earl