The gist of the A-life is that the characters in the game live their own lives and exist all the time, not only when they are in the player’s field of view. It eventually runs counter to the customary optimization processes used in games development (why perform operations invisible to the player?). Thus, such a scheme is reasonable to be used only when you know exactly what you want to have in the end. We had the game designers’ requirements to have the characters that could not only live inside a certain level, but move between the levels, memorizing the information they obtained during their existence. Consequently, we have decided that each character should come with only one logical essence regardless of the level he is at; whereas we could try to implement that with various tricks involved.

Labels: A-Life, AIGameDev, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.