“I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.“
Joyce Kilmer
Hey there.
Sometimes we make an advancement in certain part of the game that comes unnoticed. It might streamline our workflow and deeply enrich the game but on the receiving end, in the hands of the player, it might end up completely overlooked.
A great example of such situation might be with our recent addition of new behaviour tree system to SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE.One of our programmers Marcin Jozwik came up with a pretty judicious solution for, till now, quite linear story development systems in our game.
Look a tree.
So what is it?
In last Story Update, the system of relationships between individual elements boiled down to a one-to-one relationship, each new story element (like our ASCII article, note, chat) has been unlocked only by one condition. That would be actions like opening a specific article or conducting a particular conversation. With the development of our ASCII Story part of the game, such a basic system started to become insufficient. The demand for more complex unlocking conditions for individual elements increased and more emphasis was put on integration with events from the "core" gameplay elements of MCD. That is why, with the upcoming story update, a new dependency management system based on behavior trees will be introduced. Designers will get a fresh, new visual editor in the Unity engine based on the xNode library.
So now individual relations (one action - one reaction) shall be replaced by logical expressions. This will enable us to create waaay more complex conditions consisting of a combination of sequences and selectors.
So uhm, what does it do exactly?
Well let’s say we want you to be able to unlock a certain page in MCD internet.exe . Previously you would have to do exactly specific action in certain part of the game to do that. Now we can check multiple actions for that, not only one. Also since we can present any event from the game as a node (eg. shooting 123 red guys, beating a highscore in your run or playing ninja 1000 times) it makes it possible to consider it as condition for unlocking the given story element. It gives us multiple options for designing how to blend story with gameplay without having to change the game code. Coolness!
Tl;dr We can do more cool shit. Trees are awesome.
Stay safe,stay healthy eat your greens.
Szymon from SUPERHOT Team