Mary Rose Cook

The first version of the artificial intelligence code that controlled the enemies in Pistol Slut, my 2D platform shooter, was a nightmare thicket of if statements. Fortunately, someone told me about behaviour trees, and, after reading half of an excellent article about their implementation in Halo 2, I rewrote the Pistol Slut AI code as a hierarchical state machine. To do this, I made a little JavaScript library called Machine.js that implemented a generic behaviour tree. This code is open source, like all of the code I write in my spare time, but, today, I broke it out into its own library and released it as a separate project. This should make it easier for other people to reuse.

Go to the Machine.js home page to get the code and read a tutorial.

And, in case you are interested, here is the entire behaviour tree for the enemies in Pistol Slut: