In December of 2024, our 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. You can find out more via the Kickstarter page.
Hello all, and welcome to our summer 2026 update for Goal State. We are pushing forward now and things are really beginning to shape up. So let’s give you a breakdown of everything that’s happening and how it’s all coming together.
Overall Project Update
Since our last update, the focus has been on four things:
Completing the theory chapters of the course.
Recording the theory chapters.
Prepping all the lecture slide materials that are both part of the theory videos and a reward for some backers.
Getting all the tutorial code and assets in place to start recording the tutorials.
As mentioned before, this is now spread across three people, with myself handling the writing, recording, and material prep, Andrew writing up the Unity and Unreal code, and Shraddha helping with video editing and also some of the materials.
My apologies I’ve not written an update on here (i.e. website/Kickstarter page). I’m prone to simply updating people in the Discord server and then forget some of you want updates outside of that space. My bad! But here we go…
Theory Content Almost Complete
For Q2 I set myself a target to achieve two things:
Attempt to write content every day - life permitting.
Get all but three chapters of the course completed.
We have more or less achieved both of those during that time. Q2 in 2026 saw me write for 78 of the 91 days from April 1st to June 30th, and chalking up another 53,000 words, with the whole book currently at around 175,000 words long.
Just this morning I updated the review document on Overleaf where you can see progress on completed chapters, and it’s now 448 pages long. We now have only three outstanding chapters that need finished:
01-05: Constraint Satisfaction Problems (20% complete)
01-07: Modelling Uncertainty (Markov Models and Modified MCTS) (60% complete)
02-05: Behaviour Trees (60% complete)
Each of these are in some state of completion and I had to jump around to prioritise some parts given Andrew wanted to make sure the code work he’s doing largely aligns with what’s in the book (notably the GOAP and Utility chapters). Right now the plan is to have the whole theory component complete by end of August - which is a big ask given our existing commitments, but I think we can pull it off.
Recording Update
So as mentioned in the previous update, recording is broken up into four tasks: tidying up scripts, recording, prepping video content, and editing. We have about 40% of the theory recorded right now and started editing it up, but wanted to try and make the slide presentations a bit more engaging. So we’ve been working on a new slide format, plus range of presentation ‘frames’ so we can show you the work in various ways. This helps us when editing given we can treat it as a multi-camera recording, and ‘swap’ between cameras in the recording as we go, and find the right presentation style for each moment. For context, we edit the AI and Games Conference videos as a three-camera shot (slides/speaker/combo). Whereas here we’re working on a five-camera shot.
We started testing this new setup by editing a new version of the intro chapter of the book which you can watch below. I think it still needs some work, but it’s helping me figure out workflow as we are about to start bulk editing 21 chapters - plus tutorials - over the next couple months. Feel free to provide any feedback you have.
I had planned to record more than I did this month: we have several chapters on my to-do list right now to present on camera. But the recent heatwaves meant I decided against it, given my recording space heats up even when it’s cold, and this would make recording pretty difficult, or at least would mean I appear lathered in sweat.
Also, minor health update: I mentioned in the last update I had an ongoing case of laryngopharyngeal reflux (LPR), aka ‘silent reflux’. This was affecting my voice and my ability to record, and that even some episodes of our regular YouTube had suffered as a result of my vocal chords taking a beating. While it hasn’t gone away, thanks to some medication and a few changes to diet it has been reduced quite a bit, and hopefully you’ve noticed in recent YouTube episodes (and the new podcast) I sound a little more like my usual self.
Practical Update
We’ll have a bigger update on practical soon, as Andrew is close to getting everything built in both engines. Right now the big push has been to essentially build a GOAP planner in both Unity and Unreal, and that takes a little bit of time! We’re having a big catch-up soon to go over remaining work and validating what we have. Once we’re happy with the code as it is, I then start building up videos that work you through how to build it.
Now let me stress, I’m not a fan of videos where someone is live coding. That’s rather laborious and having done it before it’s not easy to edit up. Particularly as projects get larger. So our focus is going to be on introducing features and how they appear as ‘chunks’ of work for you to iterate on. More on that soon!
Wrapping Up
Right now my Q3 goals is to have virtually everything finished except for video editing. We then push to try and get the work finalised and launched by the end of the year. The team have found this a little stressful as our work elsewhere continues to grow, and we’re currently working on a bunch of projects both for clients but also internally that are pulling our attention. But I’m really feeling this whole thing is coming together now, and it’s exciting to see all the words I’ve written over the past 18 months beginning to take shape in video format.
Okay, another update soon, thanks once again for your support, and we’ll chat soon!
-Tommy