The Games Developers Conference 2013 organisers have announced that they are planning AI postmortems of Assassin’s Creed III and XCOM Enemy Unknown. The conference will be held Monday-Tuesday, March 25th – 29th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
The AI Summit has been organised with the aid of the AI Game Programmers Guild.The Summit promises to give attendees an inside look at key architectures and issues within successful games and provide insight into what AI can offer the next generation games.
Firstly, in a collection of three ‘AI Postmortems,’ developers will dive right into the most challenging AI issues they faced and how they overcame them. Ubisoft’s Richard Dumas and Aleissia Laidacker will discuss improving climbing and running mechanics in Assassin’s Creed III. Firaxis’ Alex Cheng will share approaches to movement and ability usage for the various aliens in XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and Digital Extremes’ Daniel Brewer will cover creating tactical and behavioural AI in procedurally generated levels of Warframe.
In ‘The Simplest AI Trick in the Book,’ presentation each games developer will only have a few minutes to present truly simple yet profoundly effective techniques that will “maximize the bang for your buck in your AI projects.” Speakers will include Daniel Brewer of Warframe, and Brian Schwab the Senior AI/Gameplay Engineer II at Blizzard Entertainment.
In ‘Turing Tantrums: AI Devs Rant!’, developers will once again have the chance to deliver quick, astute rants about what’s on their mind in an action-packed, hour long session. AI ranters include Stephane Bura (Hairy Tales, Totems, Storybricks lead designer), Daniel Kline (Star Wars: Force Unleashed, Diablo III, now Maxis engineer)and Brian Schwab from Blizzard.
Elsewhere, Mika Vehkala of IO Interactive and Matthew Jack of Moon Collider will examine more intelligent modern shooter and action game agents in ‘Spaces in the Sandbox: Tactical Awareness in Open World Games,’. They will discuss games such as Hitman: Absolution, their work developed at Crytek, and Xaviant’s upcoming RPG, Lichdom.
Lastly, ‘From the Behavior Up: When the AI Is the Design’ will be a two-part lecture first featuring Damian Isla and Christian Baekkelund of Moonshot Games on how they took a single AI technique (occupancy maps) and built their game, Third Eye Crime, around it. Second, Intelligence Engine Design Systems founder Paul Tozour will show how he used AI techniques to help him design, balance, tune, and test his mobile game, City Conquest.
GDC still offers over $100 discounts to select pass purchases made by March 20th, at 11:59pm EST, with prices increasing for onsite registration. GDC 2013 itself will take place March 25-29 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
For more information on the Games Developers Conference 2013 and to book tickets please visit: www.gdconf.com
