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SECTION 8: PREJUDICE is an exciting and fast-pace FPS, with a strategic twist given the history of TimeGate Studios. The bots in the game are some of the most adaptive and challenging shipped in a game this year! In this interview with Denis Papp (CTO), you'll find out everything about the AI in the game, from their low-level utility-based behaviors to the high-level strategy.

Balancing a game is a tricky process that involves many different systems, including enemy NPCs. Getting it right for players of different skill levels even more so! The sniper mission “All Ghillied Up” is one of the most famous and memorable of in MODERN WARFARE , and does a great job of illustrating how to handle difficulty levels. The mission includes a combination of linear sections with specifically spawned enemies, as well as open sandbox areas with difficulty adjusted enemies.

How would you go about designing and architecting an AI to play MAGICKA? Specifically, what do you need to build a bot capable of replacing human co-op partners if necessary, accompanying the player through single player missions. The game presents many challenges, including a wide variety of spells that result from combinations of basic elements, not forgetting the challenges of finding good positions and balancing attack with defense.

EVE ONLINE is the largest single-shard MMO game that has ever existed, and like every other aspect of the engine building and maintaining the AI is a tremendous challenge. Both computation and bandwidth between the machines in the cluster are very scarce resources. Yet still, in the most recent expansions of the game, CPP Games found ways to produce its most AI-rich interations yet in INCURSION, in particular a feature called Sansha’s Nation — a series of vicious PvE invasions taking place throughout the EVE universe.

The Paris Game/AI Conference 2011 was the largest worldwide event of its kind dedicated to the topics of artificial intelligence and game development. This year, the event brought together over three hundred developers from across Europe and beyond, featuring some of the most recent and innovative games available.

Games such as SCRIBBLENAUTS are known for pushing the boundaries of natural language processing in games, but when it comes to natural language generations many role-playing games (RPG) still primarily rely on scripts and dialog trees. How can we use better AI techniques to improve the quality of NPC dialog when interacting with the player?

ALAN WAKE is a psychological action thriller that stimulates an incredible tension during combat scenes, rarely achieved by other games, using a combination of elements that are tied together perfectly with the AI. The game was in development for over five years, emphasizing the benefits of iteration and making sure the different components of the design fit together — in particular the character behaviors.

Over the past decade, blend trees have incrementally established themselves as the de-facto technique for implementing character animation. Since these blend trees are becoming more complex, implementing them efficiently is becoming a priority, allowing games to offload the bulk of the computation to separate dedicated processors like the SPU.

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.