Praise the Sun! | AI and Games Newsletter 19/06/24
Let's talk summer schools, podcast interviews, and Dark Souls!
The AI and Games Newsletter brings concise and informative discussion on artificial intelligence for video games each and every week. Plus summarising all of our content releasing across various channels, from YouTube videos to episodes of our podcast ‘Branching Factor’ and in-person events.
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Praise the sun indeed, for here I am enjoying the sunshine in the wonderful Mediterranean. I am currently at the AI and Games Summer School in Malta, and in fact when this is published I will just be wrapping up delivering a talk to our attendees in the origins, history, and future of AI for games. For those interested I’ll see if I can polish up the talk into a video or something similar once I’m back home.
But that won’t be anytime soon! I will be going straight from the Summer School to a research seminar at Schloss Dagstuhl discussing computational creativity for game development. Then I have a brief break before my trip to Develop: Brighton. So it’s a crazy few weeks ahead for me, and one that I am very grateful for. As mad as it sounds, it’s great to be able to participate in these events, and get a chance to meet so many fun and interesting people working in the intersection of AI and games.
But while I am on the road, this weeks sees a huge update to my Case Study series, with an analysis of the AI of FromSoftware’s highly influential title Dark Souls. I wanted to spend this week discussing the challenges faced in making that happen, and the story behind its creation.
Quick Announcements
Tune in to my conversation with Gabriele Romagnoli of the XR AI Podcast which will be hosted on LinkedIn on 19th June. You can catch a clip of it below.
The GamesIndustry.biz Sprint event starts this week, in which I appear in a panel on the use of AI for automation, alongside Sean Cooper, Aleena Chia, Lauren Maslen and Lucie Migne. Our conversation goes live on Tuesday 25th June, and you can catch it on the dedicated GI Sprint site.
The AI of Dark Souls Revealed
This week I don’t have a newsletter ‘story’ as it were given a) I’m busy at the summer school, b) I was technically on vacation last week and c) I put all of my recent energy into my deep-dive analysis of the AI of Dark Souls.
You can read the full breakdown via the link above, or check out the YouTube video below, but I figured given this was such a big deal for me personally that I should dig into it a little bit more and discuss the process behind the making of this episode.
Pieces of the Puzzle
As I recently discussed in my 10 year anniversary episode sharing stories about my work on YouTube (see below), a point I raised was that new topics are like jigsaw puzzles to me. I go out and find as much information as I can to start painting a picture of just how exactly the AI works in a given game. I need to successfully internalise it such that I can then distil it into something that makes sense in a YouTube episode, and the accompanying written component. The new Dark Souls episode is a great example of this, and was a real labour of love.
With some episodes I just slowly chip away at the idea in between other projects, given it’s not clear to me how the puzzle is going to come together. While I may be able to quickly read some resources and put together an idea for a new episode, with other topics I will steal an hour here or there to go and dig into the research materials I have acquired, trying to make sense of it all. As mentioned in the episode, I first had modders reach out to share their work with me as far back as 2018, and critically they got in touch stating that while it didn’t make sense to them, no doubt it would be of interest to me. So I would periodically just chip away at it, and over time I started building up a little database of knowledge that would help identify what a particular script file means among the hundreds of files I had access to.
Now I did in fact take a break from working on this episode for much of 2021 and 2022, only really looking at the codebase on a slightly more regular cadence starting in early 2023. As such, it’s not like I’ve been working on this full time. I did in fact reach a lack of confidence in the project in 2022 and it’s why I largely stopped, but I revisited the idea last year. And as I was putting the finishing touches to the Spider-Man episode I realised it was reaching a point of maturity that we could actually make it happen.
Prepare to Die, or Not?
I think now, having completed it, that it was really important that we cover Dark Souls, given it’s a topic that has always had some mystery that surrounds it. Yes people often talk about the difficulty of the enemies, and work hard to reverse engineer information on the attacks they have, I’d yet to see any thorough breakdown of the underlying AI architecture. Why is that enemies in Dark Souls are so hard to predict? How can we begin to understand them in such a way that you can build your own strategies more effectively? To my knowledge - and by all means correct me if I’m wrong - I’d yet to see anyone describe it in the way that I have done.
What I found fascinating about Dark Souls was how simple it is in some parts, while also carefully defined in others. It’s structured chaos: a system that allows designers to craft specific behaviours, but also ensures they’re never entirely predictable, as characters can still make (heavily curated) random actions. It’s built in such a way that new actions and goals can be added rather smoothly, meaning each character can have lots of opportunities for how to respond to the player, and the system will know when to bring it in. It’s what makes Dark Souls continue to have relevance with players even today, notably with its spiritual successor Elden Ring dominating the gaming landscape in 2022 - and no doubt once again with the upcoming DLC.
There are many other games that evoke similar gameplay styles, be it Soulsbornes and Soulslikes, but also titles such as Monster Hunter, where each monster is effectively a Dark Souls boss battle. Each monster hunt relies on players preparing for with the correct equipment and items, and subsequently learning how best to approach it as the monster states change, environments change and other external factors influence the process. But critically, each monster can be varied and dynamic in how it reacts to players on a moment to moment basis, a point I discussed a couple years back in my Design Dive series (see the video below). I mean really this is me just thinking about that Monster Hunter Wilds trailer from Summer Games Fest. That game is looking very good…
Wrapping Up
Okay so it’s a little shorter this week given I’m currently on the road, but I hope to have a write-up from this weeks AI and Games Summer School for you next week. Meanwhile next weeks newsletter will be while I’m still travelling at the Dagstuhl seminar, and my hope is we can put something together for that as well!
In the meantime, thanks for reading the newsletter! Go play some Dark Souls, or at least watch the video I made about it, and I’ll catch you all again soon!