If you’ve been on the internet for long, these probably look familiar to you. This is a Nextbot. NextBots have recently had a resurgence in popularity, most of the time shown as a rogue PNG that the player endlessly runs away from to see how long they can survive. Though the perception of Nextbots is mostly comical, their existence brings up a question. Why are they so unnerving? After we take a deep dive into their history, technology, and psychology we’ll take that information to make our very own “ultimate” Nextbot. Before making our own, let’s understand a bit about these things. For those that don’t know, Nextbots are not new. Valve, while making absolute masterpieces in their source engine such as TF2, and L4D, realized that their default NPC just wouldn’t cut it. They needed better navigation for massive hordes of zombies and robots. Something that could more easily target and hunt down players. So this means that, technically, NextBots have been chasing players since 2008, left for dead’s release date. But why use a nextbot instead of a good old fashioned NPC? Normal NPCs use a Node System to navigate. If you want an NPC to be able to traverse a map, you have to place nodes in order to communicate exactly where it can travel. If it isn’t able to trace a path between these nodes to its destination, then the NPC doesn’t know how to get there. This means that if a map is more complex and has more obstacles, you have to place many more nodes for the NPC to move anywhere with efficiency. All in all, the NPC gets the job done, but it’s not super efficient at pathing. A NextBot on the other hand, uses something a little more sophisticated, called a navmesh. A navmesh is similar to a node system, but instead of using points, it uses entire areas of space. By placing down and connecting polygons in a map, you can tell the Bot which areas of the map it can be in, and which areas lead into others. Instead of having only nodes to walk between, it has access to entire areas to make a decision on how to get somewhere, leading to overall better navigation. As valve’s technology became more open to the public through Garry’s Mod, Steam users Xyxen and Nate Wingman, back in 2013 posted the first Nextbot of its kind on the steam workshop. It was called Sanic the Hedgehog. Sanic ended up garnering a large amount of popularity, and naturally, the workshop was flooded with low effort Nextbots that just had a meme or distorted face as their texture. The creative process for making them hasn’t changed much… Most just take the base sanic nextbot and change the PNG and sounds in order to stamp their submission into the ever growing library of nextbots. The reason I think that this way of making nextbots remains popular, besides them being easy to make, is because they’re fun to watch, and easily shareable through videos. When you see Obunga chasing down a player on a creepy map, it’s admittedly entertaining, the way it awkwardly slides along the floor in an unfittingly eerie map. But more importantly… Why are they so unnerving? Something so simple and rudimentary… shouldn’t be this unsettling, right? But something about them makes them almost scarier than NPCs or AI with fully fledged models and animations. What exactly does a nextbot have that the others don’t? Be honest, have you ever seen an AI move like this before? Being chased by a picture feels like it just shouldn’t happen in a game, so when it does, it almost feels like a subtle nod to the fact you are playing a game. A sort of 4th wall break. They also render as if they don’t exist in the game’s world, instead rendering like evil UI elements coming towards you. And not only are they coming towards you-, they are tracking you down with laserlike accuracy thanks to their navmesh pathing. Although, with nextbots being more of an experiment than anything, most of them haven’t been designed with a great horror experience in mind. Nextbots will ALWAYS chase you down. When you are always chased, you have no time to feel shivers down your spine, in realization that something is coming after you. You are only focused on running away and avoiding this thing. We will soon fix this. Walking around on a gmod map alone is enough to build tension in someone. gm_liminal_space. This is just one example of a terrifying map. Walking through the first hallway, I felt the liminal being directly injected into my veins. Eerie, Eerie, terrifying, Eerie, terrifying, and depressing. The amount of effort that was put in to create a map that pinpointed such a feeling is incredible, but their effort mixed with a loud screaming nextbot can ruin the experience. All that tension is gone, because our focus is elsewhere. We need to make an entity to direct that creepiness of the map towards. We need to make the entire map feel alive, and like it’s watching you somehow. And the map isn’t the only thing that we can utilize. We can use the creepiness of Garry’s Mod itself. The bulk of the assets in Garry’s mod were scraped together from Valve’s previous two titles, Half Life 2 and Portal. These games were already designed to invoke a feeling of desolation. The destroyed models and old crunchy textures that were imported have always made the game feel eerie, especially placed in a sandbox where the dark themes of HL2 and Portal are absent. There is an incongruence between the lighthearted tones of Garry’s Mod and the residual atmosphere of those other games, creating this unshakable uncanny feeling. Which’ll be very helpful later. There are also some that have lots of memories on previously populated maps, and even the other games in the same engine. This gives a sense of liminality, making the map feel like it should be busy; but… everyone vanished. These are massive tools. If GMod itself is creepy, then it shouldn’t be a problem at all to take that tension that GMod builds up, and direct it into something. This is Gargitron. A nextbot, designed with all of these principals in mind, in an attempt to create the most unnerving Nextbot AI. The biggest way we can utilize the already unsettling nature of gmod’s engine and maps, is by making Gargitron not always chase you. It has 3 different behaviors. Stalking, Chasing, and Hiding. I’ll explain the reason for all 3 of them after. Chasing is exactly what you’d expect: it will run at you at full speed, screaming, in true nextbot fashion. Stalking is its default and starting mode: It will slowly move its way towards you, playing a sound that gets louder and louder the closer it gets. Lastly, Hiding: where it will quickly run away to a random spot on the map. When you spawn Gargitron in, it will immediately teleport to a random spot and start his Stalking phase, inching his way towards your location. But why exactly do we need this stalking phase? When making Gargitron, I wanted to lean on the unsettling nature of Garry’s Mod and compliment it with this AI, so the stalking phase is necessary to add some downtime. Some time for you to feel chills after you realize you just spawned something that’s after you, and you have no idea where it is. When Gargitron finally enters your line of sight after stalking, it will flip a coin. On heads: it will enter its Hiding behavior and run out of view, making sure that you saw it hide. After hiding, he stalks you again. Building that tension even further and making an already terrifying map, even more terrifying. And if he flips tails: Better start running. But if you escape him for long enough, he will stop chasing you, and end up moving to a new spot, starting that stalking process over again. What this behavior is aiming to mimic is some sort of artificial sentience and unpredictability; By making it react to you in a random way it feels like it has some kind of thought process going on. In no way is Gargitron perfect but, the behavior, the uncanny and creepy feel of the PNG nextbot design, the pinpoint accuracy of the navmesh, And not even to mention SCP-079’s horrifying face and some spine chilling sounds from Silent Hill and FNAF, we have what I believe to be the most unnerving nextbot. Here are some of the most unsettling moments I recorded while messing around with this monster. If you enjoyed this video, there are more on the way! Subscribe if you don’t want to miss them. I make all kinds of wacky videos that I think you’ll enjoy, and I even stream on twitch! Check that out if you want to see me try and beat the hardest hollow knight boss… with one hand! And lastly, massive thanks to Foolie for helping with the entire process. Go check out his twitch channel in the description to see the first green streamer. That’s all for this video, thank you for watching, and I’ll see you in the next one. Goodbye 🙂 Video Information
This video, titled ‘How I Made the Most Unnerving Nextbot AI’, was uploaded by Gargin on 2022-10-02 22:50:08. It has garnered 3340607 views and 166976 likes. The duration of the video is 00:10:25 or 625 seconds.
Answering the question ‘what makes Nextbots so unnerving’, then making a nextbot with those principles in mind.
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Find me at: Twitter: https://twitter.com/GargazoidTV Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/gargazoid Vods: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHlt3Br3odbrkHT_WI2oFvQ
Download Gargitron for yourself at: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2868173930