Who is Alex J. Champandard?

Alex is a professional artificial intelligence programmer and game developer, having worked at Rockstar for a few years before going freelance as a consultant. He’s also a multi-media author, having written his own book, contributed to several other published works, and edited the blog at AiGameDev.com for the past year. To be honest, Alex is a bit of a recovering academic, having done research in collaboration with the games industry at the University of Edinburgh — best known for its AI department. In addition to working with and contributing to over a dozen different game engines, Alex has written three commercial AI systems himself.

What Can He Do For My Game?

Ok, that’s enough third-person narrative I think; let’s talk!

I’ve been involved with game AI professionally for about seven years now (over a decade if you count hobby projects before that), and I’ve had lots of great experiences in the process. I’ve worked with some amazingly creative designers, but sometimes I wonder how they put up with this! How come the most common tools to make behaviors in-game are Microsoft Word and a script editor?

In my experience, from working in a small team on an independent game, to the big budget prototypes at Rockstar Games, there’s one thing that made the whole difference: putting powerful and flexible tools into the hands of the designers and letting them express themselves directly in the game.

When done right, a good AI engine achieves just that; it gives full control to human experts anywhere it’s needed, but takes over otherwise and fills in the gaps. And once you have such a system, there’s plenty of incentives to use it for most of the game’s logic.

AiGameDev.com is about helping you do just that. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

Contact Form

You can reach me privately using this contact form:

Alternatively, I can be contacted as alexjc at AiGameDev.com.