An analysis of the AI in Hotline Miami

<a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/219150/Hotline_Miami/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Hotline Miami</a> is fantastic game, I’ve played both and I am still replaying them to date. The fact is, the core mechanic in the game is the combat against this NPC’s. While i was playing the 2nd one, I noticed a lot of interesting things about their behaviors, and since I am deeply interested in learning AI I decided to give it a shot. In this article, I will not go in depth into code, but in how the NPC is designed, and how it can be recreated using the <a href="https://unity.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Unity Engine</a>. The first step in my analysis is the NPC states. I noticed 6 of them: Idle, Inspect, Attack, Knocked Down, Looking for Weapon and Dead. In this article I will avoid the Knocked Down and Looking for Weapon behaviors, I may add them in the future. <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:770/0*VUWOuX_pOFEXresr.png" style="height:175px; width:700px" /> Judging from this 4 states(Idle, Inspect, Attack, Dead ), I decided to use a State Machine for the NPC, the reason for this its because it has very little number of states, and its easier/faster to implement and will get the job done. <a href="https://medium.com/@RodFernandez91/an-analysis-of-hotline-miami-ai-23c37dbcb156">Website</a>