CoAdjoint's New Approach to Gameplay

Extracted 22MAR2012 from http://www.imperialinnovations.co.uk/digital/portfolio/coadjoint/

Action is based on a mathematical model of skill acquisition. It is a software development kit designed for simple integration into software. A developer uses Action by defining a network which models how a set of skills interact with each other.

For example, a designer may want to model how fast a character in a game can run. For a simple model, the more the character runs the faster they will be, until his gains in speed begin to plateau, i.e. the character reaches his ‘genetic ability’. Now suppose that character has not reached his genetic ability. In reality, it is a reasonable assumption that being stronger has a positive effect on running speed. This is why sprinters do heavy weight training. So, if we now use Action to model strength and set up the model to positively correlate strength with speed, then if the character increases his strength, he will get faster quicker. Note that they wouldn’t immediately get faster; they now just have the ability to improve their speed at a greater rate than before (i.e. if they had not increased thier strength).

Action can extend this model indefinitely: the developer could include running stamina, jumping ability, muscular endurance (and so on) into the model to create a complex system to simulate how the character runs.This example doesn’t detail the full capabilities of Action, but it is clear that it offers so much more for gaming than currently possible. Developers are only limited by their imagination.