On the long, strange grind of tackling this, arguably the greatest challenge of this entire project and maybe even of my career, it’s easy to lose track of time. When the last update came out, I mentioned that my next big goal was to finally and truly tackle the centerpiece of Project Wild One: an NPC engine capable of, in some basic way, interpreting the actions of others around it and choosing from the many different courses of action available to it in a way that actually makes sense. I’ve been calling it AI, but I know you hear that term used a lot for systems based on machine learning these days, and that has nothing to do with my work here– this is all hand-crafted.
A couple months ago I checked in with supporters about how immensely challenging this process has been, and how things were coming together, but it was still such a monstrous task that I could only barely even estimate how much work remained at the time. Since then, I’ve made several significant breakthroughs, and I’m close to a big turning point. Let’s talk a little about the pieces of this system.