I was watching an episode of Invisible walls on Gametrailers.com and heard one of the host lament that there aren't a lot of games that make the use of AI an important part of game play. To be specific, the use of NPCs that interact independently with the environment as a part of gameplay. If I recall, the last game that featured AI prominently was Creatures and the early Oddworld games. But these games were made over a decade ago. Maybe there are a few indie games out there that attempted this at some point, but I haven't seen any that do so.

I was pondering how I could use game maker to make a simple control flow that could simulate intelligence in a game. The closest thing I could think of was a simple being with an internal timer that causes it to change its actions based on what is going on around it. I know that that is not real intelligence, but I have to start from somewhere. If I gave the object a goal (such as getting to a point by any means necessary) and add basic pathfinding mechanics, I could then find ways to improve the control flow so that it accomplishes the task.

Tell me what you think.