This video tutorial provides the most comprehensive overview of the implementation of behavior trees to date. Since their incremental evolution into the games industry ~8 years ago, a lot has changed and there are clear trends in their uses and applications in commercial games. You'll learn the key principles behind first- and second-generation behavior trees as they are currently used in games — and what challenges and opportunities this presents for your game's AI and scripting system.

What were some of the most important moments of 2011 for artificial intelligence in games? Which trends developed over the year, and how do they affect you? Join our editor-in-chief Alex Champandard for his summary of the year and predictions of what's to come!

Position picking and cover selection can be one of the trickiest problems of modern action/combat games. There are many design and technical solutions to this, but one of the most important things to get right is the workflow. In this video tutorial you'll learn how interactive tools can help reduce your turn-around time in tuning a cover selection algorithm.

Modern games feature very complex AI, and it's no secret that the systems break down when subject to the combination of ambitious designers and creative players. YouTube and other social media channels are full of bugs captured from even the most recent games. Looking at these bugs is not only instructive, but can provide unique insights into the implementation itself!

ACHRON is the world's first meta-time strategy game where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently. The game has been in development for many years, but due to the huge challenges and computational requirements needed to simulate the game at multiple points in time, it was only recently announced during the Experimental Gameplay session at GDC.

The best way to learn is from real examples! In this review, you'll hear about four different work-in-progress indie games, and in each case the AI hasn't been developed (much) yet. You'll learn how to approach the design, what factors to consider, as well as how to architect the system and lay out the implementation plan. By going through this process for iOS games, web-games and PC games, you'll be able to apply this to your own games too.

This year, the GDC celebrated its 25th edition and as such, there were many presentations looking back at classic games as well as reflective sessions from familiar faces. Though the AI Summit was only in its third year it also had the same feeling to it. The line-up combined post-mortems, showcases and tutorials of established ideas and technologies, along with rants and dicussion panels from regular speakers. If anything, this gave the impression that the AI community settled into a "groove" — having little or no trouble solving design and engineering problems as they come up. For instance, the session on "Pathfinding is Not Yet a Solved Problem" showed three developers solve all the issues on their games in very convincing and reproducible ways.