In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of complete video lecture and tutorial series on the foundations of AI for game development. While the original 30-day campaign has since closed, you can still sign up for late pledges via the Kickstarter page.

Subscribe now

Hello all, and welcome to our first Goal State update of 2026. I had planned this for February, and then I blinked and the first quarter has almost wrapped. Good grief, so let’s fill you in on where we are.

Overall Project Update

Since our last update, we’ve had a bunch of small updates on what’s happening with Goal State:

• We closed late pledges, and hit one more backer goal.

  • Now we’ll be adding the Half-Life deep dive to our public YouTube offerings.

• We’ve been recording the theory part of the course.

  • We should have some of the first videos ready to review next month.

• We’ve shared the current state of all of the completed theory writing.

  • With more chapters dropping this month.

• Plus the tutorial code and assets are approaching half-way to completion.

At this point we have three of us all working not to turn the written work into the final assets, and should be in a position to start showing off the final videos in the next month or so.

Read the Completed Written Content

In our last update I mentioned that we have around 70,000 of the written work complete. As of this week we’re just over 100,000 words, and around 60% of chapters completely written. The state of these unfinished are a mixture of:

1. I want to do more research on relevant industry examples.

2. I just need to tidy them up and finish it.

3. In the case of 3 chapters (of 21), I haven’t started them.

But I wanted to show everyone where we are with this, so earlier this month on the Discord server I shared a link to be able to see and review the current state of all 12 completed chapters. Click here to access the document in the Overleaf editor (which is where I am predominantly writing the course).

There’s some key points to raise here:

• This only includes chapters that are 100% content complete and only require spelling/grammar/accuracy review.

• This version of the document includes 12 completed chapters, and is 208 pages and ~76,000 words long.

  • To give you an idea my progress in writing remaining chapters, the version I am working in as of this morning is 296 pages and ~101,000 words long.

• If you have an Overleaf account and wish to be a reviewer, where you can leave feedback on parts of the material (see Liam’s great work on the left hand side), feel free to get in touch in the Discord and we can add you to the document.

• When a chapter is completed in the main document, I will be transferring it across for you to check out.

The full list of completed chapters at this time are:

• 0-0 Welcome to Game AI 101

• 1-1 Foundations of AI

• 1-2 Computing Fundamentals

• 1-3 The Basics of Search

• 1-4 Tree Search Algorithms

• 1-8 A Brief Introduction to Machine Learning

• 2-1 Introducing Game AI

• 2-5 Finite State Machines

• 3-1 Designing AI for Games

• 3-2 The Value of Mixing Methods

• 3-3 Game AI as Theatre

• 3-4 Smoke & Mirrors

Right now my priority is to complete 2-2: History of AI in Games and 2-3: Pathfinding Algorithms in the coming week or so and add them to the document. After this I am finishing up 2-6: Behaviour Trees, and then 1-6: AI Planning and 2-7: Goal Oriented Action Planning.

The writing is admittedly a little scattershot, but that’s also because of the order in which tutorial materials are being prepared (which is in a slightly different order).

Recording Update

Right now recording is split across four axis:

1. Tidying up completed scripts for recording.

   1. After all the written version doesn’t always translate into video delivery.

2. Recording the tidied up scripts.

   1. As we get into our more meaty chapters, recording takes a couple of hours at a time such that we can get the quality we want.

3. Preparing the video content.

   1. This means gathering from our existing assets, creating new diagrams, building presentation slides, or recording some of our demo code projects.

4. Editing the videos together.

   1. A big part here is figuring out flow and how to break up material.

   2. Rather than simply give you a chapter that is 1 hour and 10 minutes long, we break up the material into the corresponding section headers - or where it makes the most sense. So one chapter can be several videos in the final edit.

Right now we’re a little behind on recording, having only recorded about half what I planned by this time of year.

A Small Health Issue

In truth this process is more challenging than expected due to health problems I have experienced in the past year. I have suffered from an ongoing case of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR), commonly known as ‘silent reflux’. This is an ailment where an excess of stomach acid creeps up the throat and into the vocal chords. It affects your voice, while also leading to an excess of mucous / phlegm in the throat, and a sore throat.

Let me stress that, overall, I’m fine, and in good health. However LPR can have a severe impact on your voice and sadly that is my most precious commodity. After all in the past year I have gone around giving talks, engaged with clients, making YouTube videos and of course recording Goal State. But there are days where I can only comfortably use my voice in that ‘mode’ (anyone who knows me personally can attest the ‘YouTube voice’ isn’t my regular delivery) for an hour at best.

It has also meant my voice sounds deeper and more ‘croaky’. You may have noticed this particularly if you watched the episode on Amnesia: The Bunker last year where my voice is notably lower than usual (viewers even asked about it in the comments).

The good news is, I have been on a range of medication combined with small changes in diet in an effort to address this. I am generally a rather health conscious individual, but specific food, drink, and lifestyle can exacerbate this, and I’ve spent much of the past 2-3 months trying to get on top of it given the medication alone was not enough - and it was also causing side effects due to prolonged usage.

So this is a long way in saying, we’re still pushing forward, but this has slowed me done somewhat.

Practical Update

As detailed in the previous update, Andrew Roper has came on board to support getting all the tutorial materials up to my intended level of quality. Andrew is doing a great job right now as he builds the two strands of practical materials in parallel across two engines (Unity and Unreal). At this point most of the codebase is complete for the early segment of the course on uninformed and informed search algorithms, plus tree search algorithms (Minimax, MCTS), and the next step is implementing all the other pathfinding algorithms (Flow Fields, D* Lite, JPS etc.) in both engines.

But here’s a little of some of the stuff we’ve designed in the Unity project. We wanted to be able to visualise how different algorithms work by visualising how states spaces operate. So these examples show we can run different algorithms in a grid structure and how it leads to us finding paths to states. Not here we show visited states (gold/orange), states in the agenda to be visited (red), the active state (blue) and then the path (purple).

Plus of course we want to get some Dijkstra’s in there given that’s also useful for pathfinding.

Right now the grid is rigid given in the pathfinding tutorials we start playing around with the space by changing its shape, and then you start seeing how these algorithms differ, and then as we go into in the pathfinding chapter we start allowing you to run A* with different heuristics, and then variants of the algorithm to get better results.

As I say, these are all implemented in both Unity and Unreal, and then for the tutorial videos we’ll be providing you with some boilerplate code to start, and then walk through to implement the algorithms.

We should have more to show on this as we continue to put it together.

Grab Your Desktop Wallpapers

One of the backer rewards that I’ve just forgot to get done - sorry about that. We have a collection of wallpapers using the background art assets we had designed for Goal State. You have two versions of each: one with the logo as shown above, and another with a smaller version of the logo in a more reduced format in the corner.

You can find them right here at this link. They’re available in 4K format (2160p). If you have a custom size that would be beneficial, then let me know and I can ask Andy (our graphic designer) to make some updates for me.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it. We’ve made a lot of great progress since the start of the year, and my hope is for the next update you can start to see more written material ready to review, and the first videos will be edited enough for us to show them to you.

It’s all finally coming together, and I have milestones set internally for what we want done for Goal State by end of Q1. So I better go make that happen!

-Tommy

In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of complete video lecture and tutorial series on the foundations of AI for game development. While the original 30-day campaign has since closed, you can still sign up for late pledges via the Kickstarter page.

Subscribe now

Hello all, and welcome to another Goal State project update. While things have been quiet since my last update, a lot has been underway behind the scenes.

November Update

Since our last update in August, we’ve been working on three particular strands here at AI and Games:

• Wrapping up our projects with our existing clients (and prepping for 2026).

• Delivering on the AI and Games Conference 2025.

• Delivering on a significant amount of Goal State in Q4 2025 and into Q1 2026.

As you can imagine, the conference takes up so much of our time and energy to make that a reality. In fact it was only this week that I finally stopped working on our 2025 event, despite it running three weeks ago. The final 10% is always after the event ends.

But with that largely wrapping up I’ve been knee deep in Goal State writing, recording, and also the practical components as well. We haven’t really talked about this part of the course thus far. But I wanted to give an update on where we are with that, and the extra personnel we’re bringing in to help out.

Closing Late Pledges and Issuing Rewards

A quick point to raise is that I left the late pledges open throughout 2025 as people found out about the work that we’re doing here such that they can still back it. As we start moving towards producing all of the video content, and delivering in 2026 I want to close this up. I want to take a moment to thank our late pledges, we actually raised another £2500 after completion last year through this. But it’s time we draw a line through it. This will close on December 1st as we approach one year since the Kickstarter ended.

But for now a few things to check in with us on rewards going out:

• We are only 5 backers off from unlocking our third Backer Goal: the source code deep dive of Half-Life. Which will be released for free on YouTube.

  • NOTE: This is the final stretch goal we will honour, given our time and budget would be stretched to add any more at this time.

• If you’ve filled out the backer survey and didn’t get your Discord role sorted, join our Discord and DM myself our Shraddha.

• We’ll have the 4K wallpapers issued in January as we’re just polishing them up now.

• We’ve rolled out the one year paid subscription to Associate Producers and Super Patrons for this here website. You should receive an email about this. If not, let me know either on the Discord, or at this button!

I’m a little exhausted and embarrassed that we’re one year later and we’re not out yet. But things are really ramping up around here now that the conference has settled.

Theory and Written Content

Last time I checked in, we’d written about 1/3 of the course at around 55,000 words in the ‘book’ version. Since then I’ve smashed out a bunch of chapters, and we’ve surpassed 70,000 at the time of writing. A lot of that aiming to wrap up chapters I had started and not finished. Currently out goal for the end of 2025 is to have over 70% of the theory completed. That allows us to start really recording and editing a lot of the classes and editing them together.

At present this is going really well, and I’ve found my groove again as we started putting this together. In the meantime I’m spending a lot of time building up additional quizzes and finding related materials to tie the course into. After all the ambition is for us to not just be pointing to our own material on AI and Games (both on the website and on YouTube). But also other textbooks and related resources that will prove of value.

We’ll start sharing drafts of videos in early 2026 as chapters begin to take shape.

Recording Update

Filming has kicked off in earnest in the past few weeks, as I started cleaning up the chapters we’d written and preparing them for recording. After all stuff that I say in written form doesn’t always translate, and so finding ways to bridge between these has been very important.

Right now the plan is to have chapters 0-4 recorded and in the edit by the end of the year, with another batch kicking off in January after some much needed rest. Working on the edits is important given we want to figure out the appropriate pacing, and will be breaking up chapters into multiple videos so that it’s more digestible for you to work through (I’m not a fan of 45 minute long lecture style videos).

Practical Update

So I had a bit of a conundrum with this, in that I had a very clear plan of what I want to do with the practical components - our tutorial series in both Unity and Unreal Engine. I had got started, but I wanted it to be as best as it could be such that it is maintainable and can be built upon in the future.

To that end, it was time I found someone I could trust to help me get this where I wanted it to go. Because my work situation is such I couldn’t dedicate the time and energy to do it justice.

My longtime and collaborator Andrew Roper is coming on board to help us finalise the content and get it to the appropriate level for release. Andrew has been a gameplay and AI programmer on a number of projects in his 10+ years in the industry - some of you might have even met him at the AI and Games Conference. We’ve been working on this in recent weeks, and what we have planned is pretty exciting. Letting you build up your AI proficiency within a couple of simple demos and show these applications differentiate from one another. The trick is ensuring not necessarily parity, but that the Unity and Unreal versions both have the same level of quality such that you don’t benefit more from using one version of the other in your learning process.

We should have a more substantial update on what this is looking like in February time as all the materials come together.

Plus the Bonus Videos

Don’t forget that on top of the core course materials, we had a bunch of additional content unlocked by reaching stretch goals. This includes:

• A deep-dive video into the AI source code of DOOM (1993) released for free on our Goal State YouTube channel.

• A deep-dive video into the AI of Quake III: Arena also on the Goal State channel.

• An accompanying high-level overview of Quake III: Arena on the main AI and Games YouTube channel.

These are now being put into our production schedule with the aim to have them out in late Q2 of 2026. After all these not only take time to produce - like all of our other YouTube content - but also the deep dives require a different approach, and I need to figure out how that will work for us in the long run.

Wrapping Up

Thanks once again for your patience and support as we put all of this together. As stressed earlier, we have this is our company’s big Q2 2026 priority to get this out the door as I am quite excited about making it happen and finally letting you take it on.

In the meantime we’ll come back with a big update in January after the dust has settled and we have a few more things to share. So I hope you all have a great holiday season and we’ll check in in 2026.

-Tommy

In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of complete video lecture and tutorial series on the foundations of AI for game development. While the original 30-day campaign has since closed, you can still sign up for late pledges via the Kickstarter page.

Subscribe now

Hello all, and welcome to our the latest update for our Goal State project. I’ve been rather quiet about how things are coming along, but it’s time to fill you in on where things are.

August Update

So first things first, a little apology as to the recent radio silence. We were working away on things in May/June - with a bunch of writing completed and some preliminary recording tests done - only for it to get really busy work-wise across June and July - to a point that I got very little work done in June on the project.

August has been something of a reset for me, allowing me to get back to writing more of the content and putting it together, as well as sketching out the timeline going forward.

Right now looking at the course it’s shaping up. I’ve finished several chapters of writing and really got into the meat of writing more of them that need finished. One of the interesting challenges from a personal perspective, has been gauging on the ‘on-ramping’ of the learning experience. As stated in the original pledge, this is aimed at being accessible to a non-computer science audience, but in order to do that we need to sort of do a crash course on computer science in the earlier chapters, such that we don’t get bogged down. So it meant really focussing on the first 4-5 chapters of the course in Part 1 (Intro to AI) so that this feels accessible to people.

Having now struck that balance a little bit better, I’m feeling more confident as the writing comes along, and in truth it’s got easier in the past month or two than it was at the start. What that also means as a reader/viewer of the course, is that it should feel more organic for you as the learner the farther along you go, given we’re able to get into the technical subject matter faster in later chapters, given you have a stronger underpinning to build from.

Update on Timelines

Right now I’m confident we will have finished writing, and mostly recording all of the theory by the end of the year. Our plan is to have a bunch of the theory videos finished by then, while I am also busy writing/recording the tutorial side of things. This does mean that the project won’t hit the originally intended launch date in Q4 of this year, and I’m now looking at end of Q1 in 2026 as the proposed shipping date.

As discussed in the original campaign under Risks and Challenges, the thing that impacts us is existing professional obligations. We’ve been able to utilise the funds to not only bring on an additional member of staff to help me keep on talk of various projects, but also give us a financial buffer so we’re not as dependant on external contracts. One of challenges with external work however is its rather inconsistent in timing: we can have 2-3 months of quiet and then the bulk of the work I do with companies all happens at once. This is a reality of how budgets and financing works with a lot of these businesses. Hence we go through phases of quiet, where I get on with all things , and then it blows up and we’re juggling numerous obligations at once, be it working with clients or even attending events so we can kick those client conversations down the line a little - truth be told most clients we work with in 2025 start as conversations anywhere from 2024 back to 2022. Once these periods settle however, we’re in a good financial footing and I can get on with our own internal projects (videos, newsletter, Goal State) for a few months without much hassle.

Right now I have booked out November and December after this years AI and Games Conference to just getting the theory part finished, and we’re getting a good flow going now for the recording and editing part. I just spent earlier this week re-evaluating the project timeline, where we had originally anticipated we could get the theory content done by end of September, with the tutorials being written in parallel as of this month. However I have now moved it such that we start recording the tutorials in December.

My sincere apologies to everyone for the delay. While I had figured 2025 might be a year I just get on with our own projects, it is equally one where AI and Games is getting a bit more traction as a business that games studios can work with. This is great of course, but it has the knock-on effect of our own work taking a hit given I’d like us to not be bankrupt at the point when Goal State launches the first course.

Your patience is really appreciated and I am nonetheless committed to getting this course out there to you all in the coming year.

Reviews & Recording

A big thank you to everyone who reviewed our first batch of chapters a couple months back. I’m taking that feedback on board as we get into the recording in the next few weeks. We had originally intended to start recording earlier, but we’ve spent a bit more time trying out different workflows and setups over in the main YouTube output. But now that we have a decent amount of editing work to do - with around 1/3 of the course ready to record. So we will be kicking this off in earnest in September once I am back from Gamescom and then IEEE CoG in the latter half of August.

Writing Update

As stated earlier, writing is going fairly well at present, and now we have about 1/3 of the course complete, while many of the chapters are in some state of completion. In fact the course is now sitting at around 55,000 words in the ‘book’ version, which is kinda crazy. It’s going to be a 200+ page booklet at this rate.

To give a full breakdown of completed chapters:

• 0: Course Introduction

• 1-1: Foundations of AI

• 1-2: Computing Fundamentals

• 1-3: Basics of Search

• 1-4: Tree Search Algorithms

• 1-8: Introduction to Machine Learning

• 2-1: Introducing Game AI

• 3-1: Designing Game AI

• 3-3: Game AI as Theatre

We have some of these that need to be put forward for review, and I’ll be aiming to do that in the next month or so. In the meantime there are also several chapters that are close to completion, so they’re the priority right now:

• 1-5: Constraint-Based Search

• 2-2: History of AI and Games

• 2-3: AI for Pathfinding

• 3-2: The Value of Mixing Methods

• 3-4: Smoke & Mirrors

Aiming to have these completed by late September/early October would get the theory up to around 2/3 of writing completed.

Wrapping Up

So yeah, thank you all for your patience and my apologies for the delays in getting this work to you. As you can see we’re still smashing away through this - and it’s my job this afternoon to try and get one of these chapters mentioned above close to complete.

So with that, I’m getting back to it. I’ll catch you then.

-Tommy

In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of complete video lecture and tutorial series on the foundations of AI for game development. While the original 30-day campaign has since closed, you can still sign up for late pledges via the Kickstarter page.

Subscribe now

Hello all, and welcome to our April update for Goal State. We have stuff to share with you this month! It’s quite exciting. Let’s get going!

April Ramp-Up

With the dust settling on GDC, we've been able to really ramp up a lot of work on Goal State in the past couple of weeks. As such, we’ve written more than double what we wrote for the course in March. I’d say the theory side of things is around 1/3 complete, with more to come. We’re still a little farther behind than I would like, but critically we’re getting to a point where chapters are wrapping up for review, and this in-turn means that we can then start to record the videos along the way.

Quick Reminders

Some quick reminders of other things happening in and around Goal State.

Backer Survey is Still Live

The backer survey is still live, with around 40 backers still not having completed it. This is fine, we’ll keep it going for now. But a reminder to check your inboxes for a survey email sent out on January 27th.

Join The Discord Area

I’ve not had a lot to say in the Discord area this past month, given we don’t have much to share just yet. But it will become busier over time. To join, make sure you’re both a member of the Discord server (LINK), and have completed the Backer Survey.

Note: If you have completed the backer survey, and don’t have access ping Tommy in the Discord server and he can sort it out.

Writing Update

Now that I have some free time, I’ve managed to get about 10,000+ words of the ‘book’ of the course written up. I’ve been hopping around chapters when the mood strikes me. Largely because sometimes a topic is much easier to get going than others (anyone who has written a university dissertation will appreciate the situation) I’ve found some of the chapters are almost entirely fully-formed in my head and I just need to get them down.

And so now, we have four chapters ready for review:

• 0: Introduction

• 1-1: Foundations of AI

• 1-2: Computing Fundamentals

• 2-1: Introducing Game AI

These will go live in the Goal State only area of the Discord server in the next day or so for feedback. Essentially once we gather up your thoughts, and catch any issues, we’ll start moving towards recording them into videos!

Targets

So let’s start by quickly reviewing where our targets were from April, and then discuss our plans for May!

April Target Review

• Finalise Chapters for Early-Access Review.

  • 0: Introduction - DONE!

  • 1: Foundations of AI - DONE!

  • 2: Computing Fundamentals - DONE!

  • 3: Basics of Search - Moved to May

• Finish Drafts of Chapters:

  • 4: Tree Search Algorithms - Moved to May

• Continue Writing

  • 5: Constraint Satisfaction Problems - Moved to May

• Start Writing

  • 6: Planning Algorithms - Ongoing

  • 7: Markov Models and MDPs - Ongoing

  • 8: Intro to Game - DONE!

  • 9: A Brief History of Game AI - Ongoing

Not a perfect run by any stretch, but we still had four complete chapters, so I will at least take that. Also, I completely ignored part of this to go and write chapter 1-8 (Introduction to Machine Learning) which is nearly finished.

May Targets

• Finalise Chapters for Early-Access Review.

  • 1-3: Basics of Search

  • 1-4: Tree Search Algorithms

  • 1-8: Introduction to Machine Learning

• Start Writing/Continue Writing

  • 1-5: Constraint Satisfaction Problems

  • 1-6: Planning Algorithms

  • 1-7: Markov Models and MDPs

  • 2-2: A Brief History of Game AI

  • 3-1: Designing AI for Games

  • 3-2: The Value of Mixing Methods

• Record Chapters:

  • 0: Introduction

  • 1-1: Foundations of AI

Wrapping Up

So yeah things are ramping up, and I suspect we’ll be ramping up even more over the summer as our calendar becomes clearer and Shraddha and I really start kicking things into high gear!

Thanks once again for your support, and I’ll catch you all next month!

-Tommy

In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of…

Read more

In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of…

Read more

In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of…

Read more