Zombie Farm

I used this jam as an opportunity to dive into creating my first Goal-Oriented Action Planning AI system. I've been wanting to come up with a way to handle my NPC behaviors in a couple of projects I've been working on, and this felt like the perfect chance to do so. I wasn't happy with just putting NPCs on a waypoint system and letting them wander between preset points, I wanted an NPC system that would make it easy to spawn new characters and drop them into a world and they'd be able to figure out the rest themselves at that point. 

This simple GOAP system has the NPCs fulfill tasks, mainly just harvesting crops and dropping them off in a warehouse for now. But it also monitors their hunger stat, which when it reaches a certain limit the NPC's task will update to "go eat" and they will go to the camp site and eat before they continue to go back to farming. I've also created a simple 'metabolism' stat which helps to determine how quickly the different NPCs hunger bar will deplete every time they complete a task. 

Currently the 'game' is more of an AI simulation, and I was hoping to dive a bit deeper into player mechanics and develop a simple game loop. But I am very happy with my progress during this jam and excited to continue on this project. 

Sim Jam 2020: My inspirations for this jam was The Sims, Skyrim and Blizzard RTS games. My goal was to create NPCs that could complete a set up tasks and accumulate resources, while the NPCs don't have too much personality now, I was able to create a framework to build on. My future goals will be to include a day/night cycle and weather, and have these elements impact the NPCs behaviors. I will also have other roles such as cooks, mechanics and guards, ect, which will be able to utilize the resources collected by the farmers.

-Excuse the lack of zombies in this early Zombie Farm demo :x They didn't make the cut.

Special thanks to the Synty asset team!