Spooky Spring Week with Harvest Hunt, F.E.A.R, and more! | Weekly Newsletter 01/05/24
Spooky Spring Week with Harvest Hunt, F.E.A.R, and more! | Weekly Newsletter 01/05/24
Sponsored by modl.ai
Hello all, and welcome to the weekly update. While this week we’re literally starting off the wonderful month of May, we’re in something of a spooky season of content. I’ll be summarising all of the fun stuff that’s just dropped on the AI and Games platforms over the past week. Including one of the largest deep-dives behind the scenes of a game that I’ve ever conducted.
Special thanks to our sponsor of this weeks newsletter: modl.ai
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Announcements
The Barclay’s Games Frenzy is just two weeks away, running on May 16th at their Canary Wharf HQ in London. I’ll be hosting the ‘Opportunities and Risks in Artificial Intelligence and Games’ roundtable. Plus be sure to check out other roundtables from Games Leadership Academy, UK Games Fund, the BFI, and more.
You can find out more and register to attend here.I’m pleased to announce that my talk at Develop: Brighton 2024, “A Hype-Free Overview of Generative AI for Games” is now scheduled for 2pm on Thursday July 11th. Critically, this will be available in the free ‘indie bootcamp’ track. So if you’re interested in learning the fundamentals about generative AI, how you can use it in games, and understanding the risks and opportunities available, then be sure to register and I’ll see you there!
Be sure to catch the latest episode of the Branching Factor podcast which went live on Monday. I’m joined by Mark Drew of Villainous Games Studios, developers of the upcoming first-person horror roguelike ‘Harvest Hunt’ Mark and I discuss the perils of surviving as a small games studio, the benefits of publishers in supporting indies up to launch, and of course… the AI of Harvest Hunt’s antagonist: ‘the devourer!’
Lastly, the monthly AI and Games sponsor newsletter went live yesterday. This article is for patrons of AI and Games content across Substack, YouTube and more to keep up to date on upcoming topics for future analysis, and future projects in association with AI and Games. We had a lot to cover this month, including some very exciting YouTube episodes, plus our new venture being announced in the coming weeks.
F.E.A.R. ~20 Years Later
This week we don’t have a dedicated main story, as much of my free time has been spent putting the finishing touches to the latest deep-dive on the main AI and Games channel: a retrospective on the AI of F.E.A.R.
Released in 2005, F.E.A.R. is still considered one of the best examples of AI in a first-person shooter. They’re fast moving, quick to react to player behaviour, utilise the environment for tactical affordances, and collaborate to put the player in compromising situations.
While the world has largely moved on to deep learning and generative AI, much of the design and development of non-player characters (NPCs) in games is still handled by symbolic/rule-based AI systems, given they provide a level of control and affordance that these other mechanisms simply do not. In fact, this is a topic we explored not that long ago in my ‘How AI is Used in the Games Industry’ overview.
F.E.A.R. sits alongside games such as GoldenEye 007, Quake III Arena, Halo 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R and Half-Life as being highly influential during the ‘golden age’ of first-person shooters. Each delivered interesting new ways to apply intelligent behaviours to NPCs. F.E.A.R. is largely recognised for its adoption of Planning AI - a concept that had been around since the 1970s. While planning AI had been used in everything from industry logistics and taking robots to the bottom of the sea - and the moon - F.E.A.R. was the first time the idea was applied to video games.
It’s also a critical part of the history of AI and Games (not the field, this site/newsletter/company etc.), given it was the subject of the very first episode of my YouTube series in 2014.
So to celebrate my YouTube channel’s 10 year anniversary, this retrospective explores the backstory of how the AI of FEAR came to be: the academic influences, the crazy risks being taken, the lack of oversight, a pivot from 60s espionage to sci-fi horror, the creativity of the development team behind it, and the legacy the game has had in the game AI community. To achieve this, I sat down with Dr Jeff Orkin, the AI programmer on F.E.A.R. to discuss his experiences.
This has been a real labour of love, and a true honour to have Jeff share his stories for my audience. Check it out.
Wrapping Up
With the FEAR retrospective out there, I’ll be back doing more industry stories next week while I work away on the next big episode of AI and Games. In the meantime, thanks for reading and be sure to stick around for weekly updates on all things AI for video games.
Once again, thanks to our sponsor of this weeks newsletter: modl.ai
Be sure to check out their AI QA bots, modl:test, by visiting
https://modl.ai/sales-signup/