[Goal State] Shuffling the Schedule
Goal State - Backer Update: August 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 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