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 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