Book Image

Practical Game AI Programming

By : Micael DaGraça
Book Image

Practical Game AI Programming

By: Micael DaGraça

Overview of this book

The book starts with the basics examples of AI for different game genres and directly jumps into defining the probabilities and possibilities of the AI character to determine character movement. Next, you’ll learn how AI characters should behave within the environment created. Moving on, you’ll explore how to work with animations. You’ll also plan and create pruning strategies, and create Theta algorithms to find short and realistic looking game paths. Next, you’ll learn how the AI should behave when there is a lot of characters in the same scene. You'll explore which methods and algorithms, such as possibility maps, Forward Chaining Plan, Rete Algorithm, Pruning Strategies, Wall Distances, and Map Preprocess Implementation should be used on different occasions. You’ll discover how to overcome some limitations, and how to deliver a better experience to the player. By the end of the book, you think differently about AI.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
6
Navigation Behavior and Pathfinding
9
AI Planning and Collision Avoidance

Dynamic game AI balancing


Another interesting and very useful topic to learn about AI development is game difficulty. If we play against a human player, the difficulty of the game will solely depend on the experience of the player that is playing against us. If they are very skillful with that specific video game, obviously they will have a greater advantage against a player who is just starting the game. Usually, video-games tend to increase the difficulty step by step, so the player can adapt to it and doesn't get frustrated too soon or simply bored because the game doesn't offer a challenge. Dynamic game difficulty balancing is used to solve this problem, by creating an interesting experience for each gamer. To balance the AI character using this method, we take into consideration some dynamic game elements that can be adjusted according to player experience; those attributes can be the following:

  • Speed
  • Health
  • Magic
  • Power

Usually, we use these attributes to define the difficulty of the AI...