A Thinking World

Pathfinding foundations — from simple flood-fill search through to A* — then the decision-making and movement layers that turn a path into behaviour.

Demo: A guard/intruder stealth game where each algorithm visibly changes guard behaviour.

Pathfinding

• BFS — Breadth-First Search — Flood-fill search. Guarantees the shortest path on an unweighted grid.
• Dijkstra’s — Terrain Costs — Shortest path when tiles cost different amounts: mud, roads, rivers.
• Greedy Best-First — Trade the optimality guarantee for speed by following a heuristic.
• A* — Dijkstra’s optimality and Greedy’s speed, fused. The algorithm most games ship.

Decision-Making and Movement

• Finite State Machines — The decision layer: what an entity is doing now, and exactly when it switches.
• Behaviour Trees — Composable behaviour nodes that scale past the FSM transition explosion.
• Influence Maps — A second grid that scores locations: danger, territory control, recency.
• Steering Behaviours — Smooth movement in continuous space: seek, arrive, avoid, flock.

Putting It Together

• Bringing it Together — Every algorithm in one guard/intruder stealth demo.
• Going Further — What lies beyond A*, and how to recognise when you’ve outgrown it.