Welcome to another Dungeon CEO devlog! I'm Lia, the game's lead AI programmer, here to discuss the various enemies and allies players will be meeting along their journey.

Allies:

One of the core parts of building up your dungeon is choosing the right monsters for the job. We want the player to have a diverse arsenal of allies to call on to defend their dungeons, which means a lot of different designs have to be created. To help keep these allies organized, we've broken them down into a few types so you know what each of them can do.

The Dreadnaughts - These allies can handle lots of damage and do well in the front lines, holding back enemy advances. They're characterized by their high HP and defensive stats.

The Crushers - These monsters specialize in smashing through enemy lines with powerful melee attacks. They tend to have high attack stats, and enough defense to let them survive on the front lines

The Deadeyes - Powerful ranged units that prefer to battle from afar. They focus on dealing damage to enemies, having high attack stats but very little defense. 

The Occultists - Spell casters that can do serious damage to anyone without a resistance to magic. They attack from afar and don't have much defense, but they make up for it through sheer armor piercing damage.

The Dreamweaver - Stealthy assassins that sneak past enemy defenses. They can't stay in battle for long, but one attack from a dreamweaver can be enough to devastate a foe.

The Artificer - Specialists who can help out allies and hinder enemies. Depending on the type of artificer, they could do anything from healing to poisoning, from speeding up allies to slowing down enemies.

Enemies:

Each day the player will be faced with a new group of human explorers looking to defeat the dungeon's monsters and loot its treasures. They're just as diverse a group as the player's monster units, using both technology and magic in battle. They are grouped into the same six base classes as monsters, but the unit types you'd find within each category are vastly different. For example, while monster deadeyes may be creatures such as skeletal archers or rock-throwing ogres, human deadeyes may be things such as musketeers with firearms, or could even bring in highly dangerous cannons. Each unit is unique, and will require different strategies on how to defeat.

AI:

How these friendly and unfriendly units behave helps to shape how the player sees both these unit's personalities, and the world they live in. So it's important that we be able to get them to behave in unique ways. Firstly, Dungeon CEO will make use of a Behaviour Tree based AI. The goal of it is to be able to weight the pros and cons of taking different actions and moving into different positions. First, the unit determines what action to take. To give the units personalities, they each have preferences on taking certain actions. So a unit that likes to rush in and deal lots of damage has a much higher probability of choosing an attack action. The unit considers what units it can perform this action on, and then chooses the target that it will have the most effect on.

But of course we also want the player to have agency as the CEO of the dungeon. This comes about in cards used during battle, but also from taking manual control of monsters.  During a fight, the player can select a monster and order it to target a specific unit. The monster's AI responds to this by locking in that unit as their target. It also only  selects from abilities that would have an effect on them. In this way, the player is able to command their forces without having to feel the pressure of making every move themself.

To sum up the discussion, we want the characters of Dungeon CEO to be able to express who they are in battle as well as in story. This presents a challenge from both a design and a programming standpoint that I'm sure will help us in building out the world of the underground realms. I look forward to seeing how this system shapes the creation of the monsters and humans you'll meet along the way.