Btw, if you want to follow my game's prototype progress, feel free to join this Discord server: discord.gg/uk7nMuan63

I'm posting updates there as well, organising playtests, etc. Will be glad to see new people there!

But it's just an interesting technique that I accidentally discovered and wanted to share. Luckily for me, it actually works in my game, since I have limited size labyrinths for which this method suits perfectly.

Disclamer: bear in mind that this approach most likely isn't applicable for NPC behaviours in "more" open world games, as more efficient algorithms are usually used there that don't assume calculating distances to every single point.

And with that knowledge it's now possible to plan detours of certain length! Pick a random point with a wanted detour length (from the array of sums), and then from that point find the shorted distance to your next goal (rinse and repeat).

Here's a visualised iterated process:

Turns out, each number tells us what the new shortest length of the path will be if we take a detour to a certain point. You can easily check it by picking any point close to the shortest path and counting the new length (grey cells are walls and stars are mines btw).

You can see that on every point of our shortest path we have the total length of the shortest path (22 in this case). You can also see that there are "22" on non-highlighted points, which means that we have several options for the shortest route.

But what's up with the rest?

So what's the trick here? First, let's try to swap our start and goal points, and see what kind of numbers we'll get.. Well, they still show shortest distances to points, but in reverse - quite expected.
Now, what if we try to take the sum of the swapped and unswapped results? 🤔

Well, this can be useful for creating game AI, where you don't want it to be unbeatable by players.

Let's say we want to plan a short detour for the AI, but within a certain length. The shortest distances to points that we have don't quite let us calculate that straight away...

The build is already available publicly, but for the time being I publish the link only to my Discord, before I'm ready to show the game to more people.

If you are interested in early updates, and playtests, I'll be really happy to see you there:
discord.com/invite/uk7nM...

2/2

Well at least you've got your loop unrolled!

Wow, that's nice, congratulations!

If you are interested, you'll need the following to participate:
- Discord (discord.gg/uk7nMuan63)
- Google Chrome browser (PC)
- A duel partner (bring your friend, find someone in the discord server, or reach out to me)

And nice to have but optional:
- Screen recorder