Singleplayer FPS/TPS with bots

How do we make a single-player FPS/TPS with bots into a great game experience?

- Randomized items?
- Procedural elements of maps?
- Achievement-less mode with a hackable config for fun?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=XSoRbNs9bDk
imgur.com/dx7sVXj
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

Don't, first person shooters have been done to death. Game devs should try something else entirely and return to them when they have more than one little new idea.

>That creepy quake AI no-violence bots story.


Advanced as fuck AI

OP also says TPS.

>something else entirely
What's an example? Or can you at least suggest a different way to represent combat in a video game?

Metroid Prime: Hunters but actually good.

You're exploring an alien world and there are a handful of super lethal professional bounty hunters patrolling/stalking you. You can kill them at any point but unless you're powered up to a certain level, it's nigh impossible.

No other enemies except for the bots. Your primary challenge is platforming and avoiding traps.

Were the levels very large or were they the size of multiplayer maps?

If only Brink wasn't shit.

Devil Daggers?
youtube.com/watch?v=XSoRbNs9bDk

Fuckhuge. Throw in some stealthy loading screens, and have the AI's on other maps be on a global timer or something.

the original quake bots actually learnt from the players actions and mirrored it
quake 3 bots pretty much just move from pickup to pickup and shoot anything that crosses their path
UT bots are more complicated with waypoints manually placed all over the maps to tell them where to go

So there were enemy player bots represented by hunters, these were the primary objectives to eliminate? Were there lesser enemies interspersed or were the maps just mostly empty?

They were spaced out from each other the size of multiple multiplayer maps? Did the game have a very varied visual style?

This is a really interesting suggestion.

No other enemies, so most of the time you're avoiding death traps, getting through platforming sections (designed sort of openly, like Super Metroid) snagging upgrades and power ups and eventually killing the bots. Some bots give power ups upon death. Some bots never leave a certain map. All of them have some sort of gimmick. One could be sort of slower but he has medium range wallhacks. One of them runs on the ceiling and has reversed gravity. One's invisible. Etc.

Dunno how dense they would be placed, but I think a neat feature would be that once you kill one of them, a signal goes out to all of them, so all the roamers would converge on your position and you gotta book it before you get fucked.

This!

It could be a gun/X hybrid, to be fair.

OP, the only way to make an FPS fun is to make the gameplay fun. Whether or not there are other weapon mechanics,

I would play Gears because I find it fluid and fantasy fulfilling, even the graphics and movement. It doesn't help that basic movement (wall-bouncing not redeeming the basic design) and shooting has already been implemented so much though, so it's no suggestion that I would play/make more games just because I would play games that are already out.

It's all about the economy and mobility. DESU, a mech game is the best option, but I'm getting that an RPG like DaS (mechs as well) with much better mobility would be nice.

>OP, the only way to make an FPS fun is to make the gameplay fun. Whether or not there are other weapon mechanics,
FPS/TPS*

>Whether or not there are other weapon mechanics is fine
*

I'm unfamiliar with that this is.

Is this a story mode where you weren't allowed to attack bots?

imgur.com/dx7sVXj

I have never made any maps for q3, so i have no idea of how their bots deal with waypoints, for UT99 and other UT, especially UT3, its pretty fun to make custom waypoints and do some custom training maps. Thats how i trained my rocket skills and wreck people online, same goes to goo gun.


Its been nearly a decade ive played any arena shooter. My skills are probably on normal or a litttle bit above normal.

There's a lot of information in that image. I'm going to read it and bump this thread so the discussion doesn't die.

Honestly without seeing a video or having access to those AI data files, I have no reason to believe that the experiences shared in that post were genuine. For all intents and purposes I have to consider that a hoax.

But in all fairness, how does this relate to creating a better single-player FPS/TPS with bots? If the claims in this post are legitimate, then it's just a freak accident where AI did something unexpected. Was the point of bringing this post up: "To make a good single-player FPS/TPS with bots, just have an incredibly advanced AI routine that learns from each fight until they eventually don't fight each other (or at least do something wild unexpected after a tremendous duration of time)".

Wouldn't it just have been easier to say: "Having a neural network for your bots would make a single-player FPS/TPS better, it would add constant variety to your sessions. An example would be Quake 3's bots which could eventually learn to become pacifists".

Bumping, I'd really like to see a response to this post.

When I had first come upon that post, they said it was a hoax.

So what was the point of even bringing it up?

He just thinks "advanced AI" is the suggestion for a good FPS/TPS?

Okay.

Mean to add:

"What other suggestions do people have?"

after

"Okay."

The point is just learning AI. Position, direction, action -- they would probably have to record this for each player. If they can average what he does and how quickly he can react, they can at least provide a semblance of predictive positioning.

That seems moot next to EEG reading AI though.

Anyone has that macro "the toughts of this thread will keep me awake at night?" That is my exact reaction.

I heard it's not true, or if it was it has something to do with the memory being overloaded, it's been a while since I've heard or read about it but it's still a pretty cool story.

Though it probably doesn't need to be said allowing the player the ability to kill the NPCs with out powerups should be a thing, if for no other reason than to give them a reason to do a personal ironman.

I love this game, but there's no items (aside from the gems). And there's no map in the conventional sense, it's just one open arena.

The enemy behavior is semi-randomized though, which definitely makes it more fun.

Ice cream? I love Ice cream!

I guess what I'd like to see in a single player FPS or TPS with bots are randomized elements like Nuclear Throne; each stage is a multiplayer map with a couple randomized tiles here and there for flavor.

Going from one map to another presents the player with choices the require them to make trade-offs in order to continue playing the game. They can choose between conventional and gimmicky playstyles based on what they're in the mood for and based on how well their run is going.

Of course dying ends the run like in NT, but there are collectible things throughout your run that can enhance future runs (just like Isaac and NT). You could make them anything you want really: Tarot Cards that give you buffs at the expense of some tradeoffs if you expect to min/max a certain way, starting guns that replace your initial weapon with some balancing in place, or even modifications to resources and supplies with some other trade-off.

It's basically an ARPG that just plays like a third-person shooter at that point (think Hellgate London), but 1 hour play sessions and added variety on each run makes it just as accessible and consumable as Isaac or NT.

Thoughts?

A branch of an AI routine written in the 90s makes you stay up all night?

Are you like a really superstitious person or something? When you get blue screens do you blame it on not wearing your lucky shirt?

>it's just one open arena.
That's kind of consistent with the OP asking for an FPS/TPS with bots, he/she didn't necessarily say the map should be large or even varied.

Devil Daggers is a great game for a small indie team since there's enough variety for the game to be interesting to most fans of shooters but the features/content are stripped down enough for the team to have been able to achieve it pretty realistically.

Is there a way to simplify/codify 3D level design to make it so good levels could be generated using code?

OH that game is the fucking TITS

The story is actually really good.

Yeah, it can be done really discretely with large "tiles", basically just think of prefabricated chunks of the level from a bird's eye perspective: straight pieces for halls, curved pieces for corners, stairs, and so on. It could be similar in style to Tony Hawk's level creator but it could have some hardcoded elements here and there to ensure it's not insanely boring and generic.

Hellgate London is actually a game that did exactly that. It has semi-randomized 3D levels that maintain a somewhat cohesive grander vision.

fuck I always wanted to play this game

OP here, I transcribed an interview with SuperBunnyHop where he described a craving for a certain style of game like this, maybe it will be illuminating for people in this thread:

(1/2)

Super Bunny Hop interview with Players Perspective:

Interviewer: So George, I'm gonna ask you a question that I've asked everyone who comes on here, and that is, if a game developer were to come up to you and say, George you can create and video game you like, what would it be and why?


George Weidman (SuperBunnyHop): I can't wait to answer this, because I've always had dreams about a video game that plays like Unreal Tournament 2004 bot matches but in a single-player campaign, where it kind of does what hack and slash games (like Ninja Gaiden and Bayonetta) do for third person action games from a first-person shooter standpoint.

I want to, at some day in my life before I am old, play a first person shooter that has extremely challenging enemies that move really fast with slow/damage-y weapons like in an old arena shooter.

A lot of arena shooters that are coming out these days, I really enjoy Tower of Guns, I want to see what drunken robot pornography does, but none of them really kind of capture the feel and excitement that I had of just playing with bots in an old Unreal Tournament game.

Playing with humans is one thing but playing with bots... you're just barely better at the game than they are and that makes you feel really good about zipping around these maps really fast and twisting and turning your view every now and then and doing some crazy and impossible super speedy movements that often times don't translate as well when you're fighting other human beings.

I want to play a game where you're in a single-player situation with a story that you're progressing as you play through.

(2/2)

Also it would be neat if instead of shooting soldiers that take cover in an room, you're shooting ninja-like enemies that are zipping around the ceiling and moving extremely fast and that take a lot of work to bring down. That would be an example of the basic common enemy of the game.

I'd really like to see that happen at some point and it doesn't even sound that far-fetched of a concept, it sounds like a very basic conventional shooter that we're talking about, but I bet I'd have a lot of fun with that.

I'm just a fan of speedy things in general and that's probably the one outlet for speedy fast skill-based gameplay that I have not really seen developers take advantage of in a way that maybe they should.

It was a super buggy busted broken mess a lot of the time, but the art was really pretty and the game had a lot of heart and ideas. It was made by the same folks behind Diablo 2 (for the most part) and legitimately tried to innovate that formula with something brand new and challenging for the genre.

It was also pretty fun.

That's neat but that's kind of a small "nice-to-have" that wouldn't necessarily generate interest in the game if the core wasn't good to begin with.

I think the OP was looking for more systemic/fundamental designs where a single-player FPS/TPS could be successful.

Maybe check out this post with the interview for more insight on what the OP might be looking for:

Bump.