Ai Game Dev has been in my bookmarks for a while now, and provides a lot of interesting reading. The approach F.E.A.R. takes towards it's AI is particularly interesting and probably something which would work well, but is a little beyond me at the moment. Instead what's caught my eye is behaviour trees. In particular it seems to solve a problem that I've been having - how to write specific modules of behaviour (like a specific enemy attack) in a way that they can be reused and rearranged rather than having an explicit "next" behaviour.

I'm not sure I entirely understand how it's all going to fit together with some of the higher level gameplay interactions, but it's a promising direction. I think I shall leave my current FSM enemy as it is and code up the next enemy as a behaviour tree (or possibly do the same one again) and see what the resulting code is like.

Since I havn't really done a scrolling beat-em-up before, I'm expecting to take a few wrong turns with the AI before I find something that works. If anyone has any experience to share then feel free to leave a comment.