A few days ago I read about EyeQuant in an Ars Techinca article. EyeQuant, a Berlin-based startup, have developed and trained an AI they claim can tell you how clear your website it and what people will pay attention to. The company claim a number of success stories with big-name companies.
They charge a hefty monthly fee but also offer a free demo so I thought I’d give it a whirl.
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Nowhere is a place outside of… well… outside of everything. Or inside something. We don’t know.”
And with that introduction husband and wife team Duangle have forever endeared themselves to me as people and as developers. But they go on. “Strong social AI”. “First person experience”. “Procedural content”. “Emergent player-driven storytelling”. Let’s face it, with those phrases they may as well just have opened up the top of my head and pressed the “Want” button.
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In honour of the fact that we will soon be ruled by machines it’s maybe worth taking a look at how the video games industry is helping to bring about our doom. Or not, in some cases.
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Path planning, the noble art of getting from A to B, is an integral part of many games and has been the subject of a huge amount of research, not to mention wailing and gnashing of teeth. Like so many things though, pathing is something that the player will only notice when it fails – when it works it’s just another part of the game. There is more to path planning than work/fail however, and in fact the algorithms used, the decisions taken and the hacks compromises made can have a profound effect on gameplay.
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This is the third part of my game design series. In part one I gave an overview of the game and in part two I described the map generation algorithm. This post describes the AI used in the game and how a combination of simple rules play off each other and combine to create useful and engaging simulation.
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About a year ago I found myself with a couple of weeks worth of evenings free, so I decided to sit down and have a crack at making a game. Not because I had an amazing idea for a story or some mechanics, just to see if I could. A few hours a night for two weeks was enough to make some decent progress on the skeleton of the game, and one day I hope to go back and finish it off, at least to the point where my initial plans are all implemented.
This is the first in a series of posts describing the game (working-and-definitely-not-final title: Extraction), what I’ve done so far, and where I plan to go next, with a focus on the parts I personally found most interesting.