April Update: Let the Proofreading Commence!
Goal State - Backer Update: April 2025
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.
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