Re: SmedBlog: NPC Enemies and Armies

I didn't go into much detail in my blog post. There are 2 separate ideas here. One is simple - Alien NPCs (the original Planetside design called them Shifters). They are superpowerful aliens that come in and attack everyone. There are a lot of special things about them I don't want to reveal right now but the idea is more the Alien Queen and not Zergs. So there wouldn't be thousands of them. But they would be nasty as hell.



The second idea is this. What if we had certain captureable buildings that when combined with a steady flow of resources the players had to pour in would result in waves of "creeps" ala LoL or DOTA that would go towards premade points in the world. So to attack a particular base one tactic would be to capture a nearby base.. capture the spawning facility and that would result in the NPC wave (again not thousands) moving towards a specific targeted base to attack.



One other key point about them I didn't mention - they would have buildable AI that players could actually make through a scripting language. (forgot this part too) - Also you would be able to sell that AI to other players if you were an AI designer. Think Robot Wars or cRobots.



These are just ideas. I enjoy the feedback.



Thanks



Smed