Alert states (unaware→searching→combat)

Enemies progress through discrete awareness levels — unaware, suspicious, searching, full combat — and behavior escalates at each stage. Alert states are the spine of stealth gameplay: they make detection a gradient rather than a binary, giving the player a tense middle zone where a guard heard something but hasn't found you yet. Designers use them to create the core stealth loop (avoid, or de-escalate back to calm) and to make failure recoverable — being spotted starts a search, not an instant game over. Key decisions: state-transition triggers (sight, sound, missing bodies), decay timers back to lower states, whether the whole facility shares alarm state or it stays local, and clear feedback — the player must always know which state each enemy is in (icons, music stings). Pitfall: opaque or twitchy transitions make stealth feel like guesswork; players need to read and predict the escalation to plan around it.

• Dev effort: Medium
• Timing: Real-time
• Common in: stealth

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