[tmastny]

Author here: That's a cool idea, I hadn't thought of that! It doesn't quite work in the current implementation, but would with some small tweaks.

Basically we would need to have the enemy update their path only after a small delay (instead of every frame), so "momentum" would carry them on their existing path so the player could fake them out.

[bee_rider]

It could also be interesting to target a tile some number of nodes in front of the player, so the monster will go to “cut the player off” sometimes. Maybe it could result in some interesting behavior if combined with your momentum idea. The goal of enemy AI is to be trick-able in a fun manner, right?

Of course, it is easy to come up with fun ideas for enemy AI, I think if you went after all of them you’d never have time to write the nice blog post.

[OscarCunningham]

You have invented the pink ghost from Pac-Man.

[bee_rider]

The pac-man ghost AIs are definitely worth a search, fun stuff from such a simple program.

[gary_0]

> instead of every frame

It's wasteful to recompute paths every frame, since people don't entirely rethink their gross movements every 16ms. Way back when I coded some monster pathfinding, I also randomized the re-pathing interval to avoid intermittent lag (multithreading wasn't really a thing back then), which also made the monsters behave more realistically.