![]() This post-mortem by John Abercrombie digs deep into the challenges faced by the ‘Liz Squad’: a team of programmers and artists whose job it was to bring this critical facet of the game to life. As you progress through the game, Elizabeth not only enables a variety of useful gameplay features but presents a new perspective to engage with the story and the themes and concepts expressed in the BioShock universe. All of this is made all the more challenging when the character isn’t just a companion AI that follows the player for hours of gameplay but is also critical to the story.īringing BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth to Life: An AI Development Post-Mortem īioShock Infinite by Irrational Games revolves around the character of Elizabeth, a young woman that the player character rescues from her prison in the steampunk city of Columbia. We need to get the animations, the dialogue, and other audio to trigger when we need them, and we need all the AI decisions to make sense in a game where design is always shifting. While it’s critical that we get characters to make the right decisions, it’s all part of the package. Bringing BioShock Infinite’s Elizabeth to Life: An AI Development Post-Mortem Ranging from the navigation meshes not building as intended to dynamic generation to reflect real-time changes, maintaining smooth performance, and the problems that emerge when having characters path hundreds of meters at once across harsh terrain. So how does having a lot of rocky, realistic terrain in the likes of Death Stranding get in the way of the navigation mesh working as intended?Įric Johnson of Kojima Productions gave a fantastic postmortem on Death Stranding, highlighting the myriad of challenges faced during development. But navigation meshes are reliant on nice, flat, undisturbed areas of ground. So if you need a character to move to a particular location, it can then run a pathfinding algorithm on the navigation mesh to figure out how to get there. Typically for characters to move around the world, we need a navigation mesh to be running in the game that will enable us to calculate the available area within which an NPC can move around. The Post-Mortem on Kojima Productions’ ‘Death Stranding’ The Mules and Demens you will come across are intent on hunting you down and stealing your precious cargo, but if they can’t figure out how to reach you, then they wouldn’t be doing a particularly good job, now would they? Given that players are walking across these rough and rugged landscapes, it’s expected that AI-controlled non-player characters (NPCs) will do the same. The Post-Mortem on Kojima Productions’ ‘Death Stranding’ĭeath Stranding is effectively a big-budget walking simulator, where players deliver packages to waystations across a desolate yet hauntingly beautiful post-apocalyptic America (that could easily be mistaken for Iceland, given the artistic inspiration). So let’s walk through some useful (free) talks to get started on, just to familiarise yourself with the types of problems you might expect to find in AI for games, but also being able to respect the needs of designers and what the open challenges are that we’ve yet to find sensible and scalable solutions for.ĭisclaimer: The author has been one of the advisors to the AI Summit for GDC since 2020, meaning they have an influence on the talks that appear at the event and support speakers in preparing their final presentations. While access to the complete contents of the vault requires a paid subscription, there’s still plenty of interesting content released for free for anyone to watch both on the vault site and via the GDC YouTube channel. In fact, you might even find some talks presented by the folks here at modl.ai on the work they’re up to as well!Īll of the talks are recorded and later made available courtesy of the GDC ‘Vault’. The Game Developers Conference runs in San Francisco each year, and there are a variety of talks on all things AI and machine learning for games. One great way to find out more is to learn from the experts. ![]() ![]() Artificial intelligence (and machine learning) is a very big field! There’s a lot to unpack here. If you’re looking to get started working in AI for games, it can all be a little intimidating. ![]()
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