Chris Heckerspyparty.com

…plus some ranting.

SpyPartyA Game About AI…

What is SpyParty?

Less of this......more of this.

demo

SpyParty Aesthetic Goals

perception vs. deception & performance

attention as a resource

consequential decisions with partial information

deduction vs. intuition

analysis paralysis vs. extinct by instinct

extreme asymmetry

Mechanicscomplete focus on player skill

map navigation

aiming & shooting

micro

combat strategy

behavior perception

subtle performance

playing it cool

social pattern matching

고수

These Mechanics Have Ramifications

If we want “performing NPC behavior” to be a

player-skill……NPCs and the Spy should share the same behavior

systems.

…we are forced into certain types of

technical solutions.

Pathing

Spy controls feed into pathfinder

Click-to-move vs. analog control?

Inverse Kinematics

Spy will not align properly, so NPCs must not either

Auto-docking?

Inverse Kinematics

Almost nobody works on this stuff.

Situations

simultaneous layered affordances

Situations

Spy situations and affordances ‘inherit’ from NPC’s

Situations

Spy tracks same state as NPC in a situation

Situations AI System

• really not that much to learn here (yet?)

• sort of like Sims interactions, but simultaneous, layered, resource-based

• easy to code, one situation per file

• bottom out as C switch() statement and enum states, Spy handled with if()s

• talks to lower level animation system

Two Open [Solvable] Problems

The Outro Problem

The AIAnim Problem

Disclaimer: I may be the only one who thinks these are unsolved.

The Outro Problem

Who is responsible for the outro?

The Outro Problem

Intros are (relatively) trivial.

intro

body

The Outro Problem

Outros are a disaster.

WTF?

bodystimuli

WTF?

The Outro Problem

A lot of systems just punt, and hope the

animation state machine and/or

blender will fix the problem, or just

ignore latency and correctness.

This will never result in high

quality behavior and movement.

The AIAnim Problem

How and what do the AI and

Animation systems communicate?similar but not identical states

wide bidirectional interface

combinatorics are deadly

proceduralism can’t compete on quality

The AIAnim Problem

I do not think the solution looks like this:

I think both the Outro Problem and the

AIAnim Problem have a common root

cause:

Interesting things happen over time.

Computers and programming languages are not good at dealing with things that happen

over time.

Auto-docking?Click-to-move vs. analog

control?

These are game design questions.

AI programming is game design.

The lack of recognition of this fact, and the

failure to embrace it, explains why most AI research has not had

an impact on the game industry.

graphics, networking, algorithms, signal processing…

Games are the aesthetics of interactive systems.

Frank Lantz

Aesthetics is the opposite of science.

AIGame Design

Games

Aesthetics

You are hosed.

By ‘you’, I mean anyone who tries to do work in

game AI without doing the game design part.By ‘doing the game design part’, I mean

actually making compelling games.

Doing AI without making games is

like writing graphics code but never rendering

an image.

Work on highly leveraged & relevant problems, right at the edge of your ability to

solve them, and then really “test the solutions”.

AI is the future of games.

Step up to the plate.

Thank you!

checker@d6.com

spyparty.com