ALERT STATES (UNAWARE→SEARCHING→COMBAT)
Enemies progress through discrete awareness levels — unaware, suspicious, searching, full combat — and behavior escalates at each stage.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME
- COMMON IN STEALTH
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.
SEEN IN
- METAL GEAR SOLID V: THE PHANTOM PAIN
- TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL: CHAOS THEORY