Animal Behavior System
Game: Wild Things: Animal Adventures
Role: Game Designer
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Designed and prototyped in Unity animal behavior system that dictated how animals roamed and interacted on main map
Making the World Feel Alive
Wild Thing was a narrative match-3 game that allowed players to build out a jungle environment and populate it with animals and interactive objects that they unlock.
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The original intent was to have all the animals have their own personalities, likes, and dislikes. The player would watch the world become more and more lively as they played the game - adding more animals and interactable elements to the world.
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I was tasked with designing the system that allowed the animals to wander around the world without player input, interacting with each other and other objects in the world.
Wander Behavior
I designed the base system that allowed players to wander around the game's hub, an area called the Tree of Life. It was around this point that players could add interactable playgrounds for animals to interact with.
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The system determined where animals could roam to, what objects they would interact with based on their likes, and which other animals they would talk to. This was all done automatically without player interaction via a state-based system. Each animal would 'pick' what they wanted to do based on what they were currently doing, what was around them, and what they liked doing.
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The end result would be a completely hands off system where multiple animals would wander around the Tree of Life, talking with each other, playing games, and having fun. The player's joy came from customizing their play area and then watching the animals play out their lives in that area.
Basic logic flow for animal wandering
Animal Personalities
To give animals light personalities, I designed a system that incorporated hidden interest 'stats' for each animal. Each animal would have a reaction to certain interests or topics which dictated how they would respond during conversations. The system was meant to be very light and fun - not to create a deep simulation.
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Conversations were all carried out via emoji style word bubbles and depending on characters' interests, different conversation topics could be chosen and reacted to. For example, the fun loving lion could talk about ghosts with the more timid elephant, and that would make her respond in a frightened way.
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Though most animal interests were purely for flavor, they would also talk about foods and games, and players could then use that information to feed them those foods or have them interact with those games to gain bonuses.
Prototyping in Unity
Using Unity, I created a functioning prototype to give the team an idea of the animal wander behavior system in action. The prototype used visual scripting with Blueprints and showed two animals wandering around on their own, discovering objects of interest, playing with them, and also running into each other and choosing topics of conversation. Navmeshes are used to navigate around objects and simple sphere are used as radiuses to determine what was within range to interact with.
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The video shows a sample of the prototype which sees a lion and crocodile wandering around the environment. The small squares are interactive points of interest that the animals can play with. The animals freely wander, play at the points of interest, then see each other, move into range to talk, and talk about a few topics.