Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
2
Observing the World
The most important skill to develop that will help you in constructing reason-
able behaviors is something you will not learn how to do in this topic. You
must, of course, know what it is you are trying to re-create. If you are at-
tempting to create a behavior for an entity that is
not
familiar (space aliens come to
mind, although there
are
people who claim to be subject matter experts), you are at
least going to want to find something that is similar to base your models on. Once
you know what it is you are trying to re-create, you need to be able to
observe
what
that entity generally does.
If you have taken a biology class in school, for example, you may have created
what is often referred to as an “observation log.� This is really not much more
complicated than it sounds. At my high school, our biology teacher had a pet owl
in the classroom. When it came time to do the observation log, the students would
grab pencil and paper and, for 45 minutes, watch the owl and make a note of every-
thing it did. These observations were generally very simplistic (apparently owls don't
do much when sitting on a perch in a school classroom). They made notes such as:
Turns head left
Blink
Turns head center
Blink
Blink
Ruffles feathers
Blink
Repositions right foot
15
