When I first started using Quest, I had an idea for a game that I called “What Will Be”. It was loosely based on a story I had started writing but never finished, involving a group of people brought together by government forces for (initially) unknown purposes. It was going to be a parser game, and I wanted it to have multiple autonomous NPCs. It was during my attempt to create the infrastructure for this game that I first came up with the idea of “goals”.

A “goal” is conceptually similar to its real life counterpart, though expressed in terms of the game world: a goal is, roughly speaking, a desired world state. Perhaps it’s an NPC wanting to be somewhere. Perhaps it’s a door being opened or an object given. The idea would have to be extended to more internal things as well (e.g. speaking to another character with the goal of conveying information), but I figured I’d get to that once I got the more mundane situations out of the way. Trying to bite off too much at once can lead to either indecision or madness.

I chose some initial goal situations to implement. They were these:

1. An elevator
2. NPCs getting from point A to point B in the game world (a three story building, in this case), including riding the elevator and using key cards to enter rooms.
3. An initial scene where an NPC leads the PC to a meeting.

With respect to number 1, I seem to have this thing for elevators. Perhaps it’s because they have straightforward, well-defined behavior but with multiple parts (e.g. the car itself, buttons, doors, lights). And NPCs moving around and pursuing agendas was something I really wanted as well.

My first stab at code for goals had a form which I realize now was incorrect. I’ll briefly describe it and then get into where that led me, which is to where I am today.

A goal had three main pieces:

1. a “try” action,
2. an “achieve” action, and
3. code to work out whether either of those was possible (Can the goal be achieved? Can the world be changed – can I try – in order to create the conditions where the goal can be achieved?)

If the necessary conditions for a goal existed, then the goal could be achieved. A goal had behavior when the goal was achieved. It might be an NPC transitioning to a new room. It might be some other change in world state.

If the world conditions were not such that the goal could be achieved, then there was code to try to get the world into that state. And the “try” section had conditions as well.

Let’s give an example.

An NPC wishing to enter the elevator would acquire an “enter elevator” goal. The conditions for entering the elevator were that the NPC had to be in the elevator foyer, and the elevator doors had to be open. In that case, with those conditions satisfied, the “achieve” action moved the NPC into the elevator car.

If the doors were not open (but the NPC was in the elevator foyer), the NPC had an action to try to change the world to achieve the goal: pushing the elevator button, if it wasn’t already lit up.

So we have this:

• achieve condition = NPC in foyer and door open
• achieve behavior = NPC moves into elevator
• try condition: NPC in foyer and elevator button not pressed yet
• try behavior: press elevator button

If the NPC was in the foyer and the button was already pressed, the NPC had nothing to do. It effectively “waited”. Once the elevator showed up and the doors opened, the NPC could achieve its goal by entering the elevator.

The elevator itself had two goals: “close door” and “arrive at floor”. The close door goal’s achieve behavior was to close the elevator doors. The one for the “arrive at floor” goal was to open them. So they were mutually exclusive goals, with mutually exclusive conditions. The “try” action for “close door” was to count down a timer set when the doors had opened. When it reached zero, the doors could be closed. The “try” behavior for the “arrive at floor” goal was to move the elevator to a floor that has been requested by an NPC or PC.

If the elevator doors were closed and no buttons were pressed (either inside or outside the elevator), it did nothing.

The initial “lead player” sequence was a complex mix of path following (both to the player and to the target room) as well some canned dialogue meant to coax the player to follow. There was also a “hold meeting” goal sequence, which was really canned and really unsatisfying to me.

What I found most unworkable about this method of doing goals was the need to manually string them together. For example, any path following (move from A to B) was explicitly programmed. There was nothing in the NPC that decided on a room or worked out how to get there. Plus, I wanted it to be possible to “interrupt” an NPC’s goal chasing. They might be heading to their room, but if you started talking to them, I wanted that goal to be put on hold (if it wasn’t too pressing) to take part in the conversation, with moving toward their room to resume once the conversation was over – unless some other more pressing goal had come up. The key here is that each step along the way in path following needed to be its own goal, to be evaluated and next steps considered at each turn.

To the extent that it worked, it worked nicely. But something wasn’t right with it.

Fast forward to my work with ResponsIF, and I found myself once again trying to implement an elevator. For one thing, I already had done it in Quest, so it was a sort of known quantity. The other was that if I couldn’t implement that, then I probably couldn’t implement much of anything I wanted to do.

Right away, I ran into the same problem I had had before with the Quest “goal” code: I was having to program every little detail and hook everything together. There was no way to connect goals.

After much thought, I had a sort of epiphany. Not only did I realize what needed to be done, I also realized why that original goal code seemed awkward.

First the original code’s flaw: the “try” and “achieve” sections were actually two separate goals! For example, the “enter elevator” goal included not only that goal but the goal that immediately preceded it. In order to enter the elevator (the desired state being the NPC in the elevator), the doors had to be open. But the doors being open is also a world state! And the “try” code was attempting to set that state. Strictly speaking, they should be two separate goals, chained together. I had unconsciously realized their connection, but I had implemented it in the wrong way. And that left me unable to chain anything else together, except in a manual way.

In this case, we have a goal (be inside the elevator) with two world state requirements: the NPC needs to be in the foyer, and the door needs to be open. Each of these is a goal (world state condition) in its own right, with its own requirements. In order for the NPC to be in the foyer, it must move there. In order for the doors to be open, the button must be pressed. I’ll break this down a bit in a followup post, to keep this one from getting too large.

So what needs to be done?

What needs to be done is to connect the “needs” of a goal (or, more specifically, the action that satisfies a goal) with the outputs of other actions. We need to know what world state an action changes. And there is where we run into a problem.

“Needs” in ResponsIF are just expressions that are evaluated against the world state. The game designer writes them in a way that reads naturally (e.g. ‘.needs state=”open”’), but they are strictly functional. They are parsed with the intent of evaluating them. There is no higher level view of them in a semantic sense.

In order to have a true goal-solving system, we need to know 1) what world state will satisfy goals, and 2) what world state other goal actions cause. The goal processing methodology then is, roughly, to find other goals that satisfy the goal in question. Then we iterate or recurse: what conditions do those goals need? Hopefully, by working things back enough, we can find actions that satisfy some of the subgoals which are actually able to be processed.

It’s a bit more complex than that, but the first coding addition needed is clear: we have to be able to hook up the effects of actions with the needs of other actions in a way that the code can do meaningful comparisons and searches and make connections. We need to be able to chain them together. Once we have a way to do that, then the code can do itself what I had been doing by hand before – creating sequences of goals and actions to solve problems and bring to a life a game’s overall design.