Good day, fellow Keepers!
We hope you had an amazing time during the past silent weeks, and we are quite happy to present you with the first fruit of our dedicated work: the first fully autonomous and working artificial intelligence, capable of expanding its position, reacting to player's actions and eventually destroying your Keep, provided the opportunity :)
Today we enable a new AI option in the Local Multiplayer that you can use to practice against a computer opponent with the Towers of your choice. Right now there is only one level of automated adversary - Basic, which will later be expanded into multiple levels of difficulty allowing you to fine-tune your gameplay experience to your skill level.
Besides, all the new levels you design in the Editor are currently set up to use Basic AI as the second player with the Towers selected in the Editor mode, so you could also try the AI out in all kinds of situations. We are looking forward to it!
Now, the basic Computer we have for you in this update has a few flaws:
- AI does not yet know how to properly use Repair, Builder and Barracks, due to the high intrinsic complexity of those towers - so they are blocked for selection for now. Will be provided in future updates!
- AI might occasionally do something rather strange - for example, attack Neutral AI Towers instead of targeting the Player. This indeed is a priority issue and will be fixed in the upcoming patches as well. For now, we recommend sticking our new robotic friend to maps without a third player.
The good news is that AI development really helped us understand our game better, by bringing a lot of unexpected, unseen counterplay to attack otherwise considered strong. As you can see on the screenshots above, where the AI is playing with the Black, our new Keep the Keep bot will find an interesting application to the Towers it possesses (especially all kinds of attacking Towers, the humble Bow in particular).
Finally, we have a small Quality of Life change for you: from now on, all the destroyed Towers are animated with an appropriate effect, highlighting their untimely demise with a shake and a smoke cloud.
We hope it will help you get a bit more immersed in the world of Keep the Keep.
That would be it for this time, folks! Happy keeping!
Sincerely yours, Nebulate.me team