Practical Game AI Programming

Group fight

Let's create a scenario where we have multiple AI characters fighting the player. We start by implementing the combat features into the character code, such as attacking with one hand, attacking with two hands, defending, going after the player, and all of that. Once we have that implemented, the character is able to fight the player and that's the starting point. If we didn't plan anything and we had four characters fighting the player, they all would attack at the same time to defeat the player.

That would have worked with a few bugs here and there, but it would do the job if we didn't have time to create a better system. What we are looking for is to get some interaction between the AI characters so they won't look stupid attacking ...