GDC AI Summit 2010
January 27, 2010
I have obviously not been updating this blog regularly, but I plan on doing a better job of this in the future. Hey I did a pretty good job through most of 2009, what do you want from me?
Today I want to just quickly mention some news about the AI Summit at GDC this year. I’m going to be involved with two sessions – one panel and one group lecture. Here’s the info:
Suspending Disbelief: Bringing Your Characters to Life with Better AI
Speaker: Steve Gargolinski (AI Lead, Blue Fang Games), Phil Carlisle (AI Programmer/Senior Lecturer, MindFlock Ltd./University of Bolton), Michael Mateas (Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz)
Date/Time: TBD
Experience Level: All
Summit: AI Summit
Format: 60-minute Lecture
Session Description
In the past 30 years, game graphics have progressed to the point where still shots and cutscenes can often look extremely realistic. However, as soon as characters act in the world, that sense of believability is often broken. The characters no longer seem alive. Much of the impression that something is alive comes from minutia such as what they look at, how they move, and what they do when they aren’t doing anything important. This session examines this phenomenon and gives concrete examples of how to improve the feeling of aliveness in game characters.
Idea Takeaway
Attendees will see how including subtle details in the behavior can increase the believability of game characters.
Why So Wary of AI Middleware?
Speaker: Steve Gargolinski (AI Lead, Blue Fang Games), Chris Jurney (Senior Programmer, Double Fine Productions), Brett Laming (Lead Programmer, Rockstar Leeds), Borut Pfeifer (Freelance Game Programmer/Designer, Plush Apocalypse Productions), John Funge (Head of Game Platforms, Netflix)
Date/Time: TBD
Experience Level: Intermediate
Summit: AI Summit
Format: 60-minute Panel
Session Description
In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of available AI middleware products designed to streamline common development techniques. Their reception by the industry has been spotty, however. While there are some success stories and some tales of horror, many studios and individual developers still eye AI middleware with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. This four-person panel, comprised of people whose experiences and opinions are spread across the spectrum from pro to con, will share their rationale for why existing middleware is good or bad and what changes future products could make to become more appealing to developers.
Idea Takeaway
The attendee will hear real stories of how the use of AI middleware has hurt or helped development projects.
Interview: Cyberpets: All creatures great and virtual
November 3, 2009
Recently I did an interview with The Independent, which is a British newspaper. My co-worker Bruce and myself talked about some of the philosophy and challenges involved with creating virtual animals.
Click here to read the interview!
Here’s the text below:
Cyberpets: All creatures great and virtual
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
They’re cleaner, tamer and more obedient than real animals – and the newest cyber-pets are more ‘life-like’ than ever, says Toby Green
They don’t bite, they don’t make a mess on the carpet and they don’t cost anything to feed. The appeal of virtual animals is clear. Both cute and attentive, they treat you as if you are the centre of their world – without any vet’s fees. Video games involving animals are perfect family fun, and come in many forms. Virtual pets have been particularly popular – over 70 million Tamagotchi toys, the Japanese handheld digital pet, have been sold, while the Nintendogs series, in which the player looks after a virtual puppy on their DS, has been a major seller for Nintendo since its launch in 2005.
Other beastly adventures have involved giving players the chance to run a zoo – the Zoo Tycoon titles – or shape the lives of wild animals, such as the SimAnimals franchise. For the developers, they pose a unique challenge – given that these games live and die on the appeal of their stars, recreating nature can be a tough job.
On Friday animal fans will get the chance to play the latest in a litter of new animal-inspired titles. World of Zoo, available on the DS, PC and Wii, lets gamers get closer to the animals and more involved in their lives than is possible in real life. For the game, US developer Blue Fang – the company behind the Zoo Tycoon titles which first went on sale in 2001 – had its work cut out, creating more than 90 species across 11 animal “families”, with one of the first tasks being to decide how realistic the creatures would be.
“We really wanted World of Zoo to be a fun, high-paced game,” says Steve Gargolinski, who worked on the animals’ AI (artificial intelligence). “However, one thing that we learned during our trips to the zoo is that real animals often do a lot of lying around.”
To deal with this issue, some leaps of imagination had to be made. “We needed certain animals to do things that they never do in the wild,” says Gargolinski. “Giraffes don’t roll over – but we thought it would be fun for them to do it. So our animators sat down with the challenge of answering the question, ‘If giraffes did roll over, what would it look like?’”
The result, Gargolinski hopes, is believable, if not realistic – something that was the aim of the game. One of the key figures in attempting this goal is Bruce Blumberg, an expert in animal learning and behaviour. Not only does Blumberg have a wealth of academic experience – he is former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab and currently teaches at the Harvard University Extension School – he is also a keen dog owner who competes in shows with his Border Terrier, Scuppers.
Since animal games are all about keeping the creatures happy, players need to be able to tell how they are feeling – a challenge for Blumberg, who worked on how this could be communicated through the animals’ animation. “One of the first things I did was take videos of me with my dog, doing things like holding up a bone or pretending I was going to throw a ball,” says Blumberg. “Then we would analyse it frame-by-frame – it would get people thinking about the conversation that is going on and how we know what the animal’s thinking.”
Blumberg was also able to take his academic background and use it in the game’s development. “One of the projects I did at MIT was a dog-training simulation,” he says. “That’s something that probably wouldn’t make a great game, but it was a really good intellectual exercise, and it contained many of the same ideas that carried over to World of Zoo in terms of really paying attention to what the animals were telling the player.”
In World of Zoo the animals are split into enclosures, so only interact with members of their own animal “family”. The team behind SimAnimals, however, had a different challenge. The series of games – the second of which, SimAnimals: Africa, was released last week – are set in the wild, meaning developer Electronic Arts has had to work out how the animals would react with each other.
By studying animals’ natural behaviour – what they eat, whether they hunt or are hunted – its creators came up with what Sam Player, executive producer, calls “a recipe for each animal for how they’ll behave”. The results, he says, are animals with their own realistic behaviour patterns.
“The game is a living, breathing eco-system,” says Player. “If you want to sit back and watch it like it was a terrarium, you could, and the animals would take care of their own needs.” Still, like World of Zoo, some changes to reality had to be made. “If we went with super-realism with our animals, we would basically have a game where they sleep, eat and try to kill each other,” says Player. Of course, getting the virtual animals’ behaviour spot-on is useless if poor animation reminds the player that they are just a bunch of pixels. Interestingly, Blue Fang did not attempt photo-realistic graphics for World of Zoo, instead using cel-shaded animation, and the resulting cartoonish look, claims Blumberg, helps to involve the player in the animals.
“I think our animals, even though they may be less realistic than some games’, are more believable and have more organic credibility because the movement really works,” he says. “We focused on animations that tell a story to the player. We want them to roll over in a way that is communicating whether they are sad or happy.”
Of course, basic visuals did not stop the Tamagotchi becoming a craze, but now the virtual pet concept has moved on with EyePet, an innovative game that places the pet in the room with you. It works by using a webcam to produce a live video feed of you in your living room, on to which the pet is superimposed, and the player can then interact with the critter using hand gestures.
When it came to designing the pet itself, the developers had to create something that would be able to fulfil all the activities they were including in the game. “We wanted to make our pet believable and something that people would be able to relate to, but our pet also has some special things that it can do,” says Russell Harding, the producer of the game. “Rather than being a mythical creature, we wanted something that was still very animalistic, so that people would know how to respond to it, but can also draw and sing, which is not totally animalistic behaviour.”
As a result, they created a pet that is like a cross between a monkey, a puppy and a kitten, although with human facial expressions because, says Harding, they wanted it to be expressive and avoid “text and voice-overs popping up”. All these are features that help create a relationship between the player and the animal, something developers have to be careful not to ruin – Gargolinski believes the most challenging part of creating animals for World of Zoo “was never breaking the illusion of life that we worked so hard to develop”.
He adds: “Let’s say that a player has created a bond and shared a story with their absolute favourite baby tiger. If this tiger walks into a wall, freezes, pops through an animation, or looks stupid in any way, it causes huge damage to the player-tiger relationship. Suddenly that tiger is just buggy software instead of the player’s real friend.”
Whether an animated creature in a game can inspire the same depth of feeling as a living, breathing organism is debatable, but they do offer unique experiences that just are not feasible in reality. And of course, a break from those vet’s fees.
Pet projects: Games to get your paws on
Ecco the Dolphin (Sega Mega Drive, 1992)
This classic side-scroller from Sega saw players take control of the eponymous dolphin, solving puzzles and attempting to save Ecco’s pod. The game had an ecological theme and also represented dolphin dehaviour in a realistic way – it seemed to work, as the most recent Ecco title was released for Xbox Live Arcade in 2007.
Nintendogs (DS, 2005)
Nintendo’s virtual pet dog title was set apart from the cyber-pet competition by the way it made use of the DS’s features, such as being able to give orders using the microphone, stroke the on-screen hounds using the console’s touch screen and because of the different versions which offer the chance to look after a range of breeds.
Viva Pinata (Xbox 360, 2006)
While Microsoft’s Viva Pinata might have seemed to be all about candy-filled papier mache animals, it also encouraged players to create a haven for their menageries, keep their creatures safe and even encourage them to procreate.
National Geographic: Panda (DS, 2008)
Last year the National Geographic Society branched out into video games, and this panda simulation aims to educate as well as entertain.
Farmville (Facebook, 2009)
This free title gives social networkers the chance to build up a functioning farm, complete with interacting animals, while they work out who to poke; there are 62.8 million smallholders.
World of Zoo is on the Shelves!
November 3, 2009
World of Zoo Logo
So the game I’ve been working on for a while, World of Zoo, is finally finished and on the shelves! Check it out on the virtual shelves here for the Wii and here for the PC. You can also download it from Steam if that’s your kind of thing.
I’m really proud of this game, and hope that people have fun playing it!
When is a Loading Screen Actually Cool?
October 21, 2009
Answer: In From Software’s new game 3D Dot Heroes! Check out this link to see what I mean. I like the Torneko one.
Dungeon Hunter Mini-Review
September 30, 2009
Dungeon Hunter Screenshot
This is going to be a very quick review since I want to go back and play some more, but if you’ve been waiting for Diablo on your iPhone then go pick up Dungeon Hunter ASAP! It costs $7 and is worth every penny so far.
Upcoming Talk at AIIDE
September 10, 2009
AIIDE Logo
So this year I’m fortunate enough to be one of the invited speakers at AIIDE, which is Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. I’m going to be talking with my coworker Lee, and the info for our talk is pasted below. I can’t wait for this conference!
Abstract
Where AI and Animation Converge
The mission statement behind World of Zoo was to allow players to create, care for, and play with amazing animals that love to get up close and personal. While narrowing down the high level goals, we knew that a strong connection between AI and animation would be necessary to sell a rich inner life in our cast of characters.
In order to tackle this problem, we set out to knock down the walls between animation and programming, to create an AI system that transfers performances from animators’ heads onto the screen as efficiently as possible. Learn about how we utilized Havok’s Behavior technology, filled in the blanks with our own proprietary tools, adjusted our organizational structure, and developed an AI backend to create a charming, character-driven Wii title.
Bio
Steve Gargolinski is the AI Lead at Blue Fang Games and has recently finished work on the Wii title World of Zoo. Coming from a strong technical background, he enjoys thinking, writing, and speaking about game AI, programming, and the development process.
Leland Hepler is the Director of Animation at Blue Fang Games in Boston, MA. Before joining Blue Fang to develop World Of Zoo for the Wii, he spent 14 years as an animator at Walt Disney Feature Animation Studios in Los Angeles. His screen credits include: Lion King, Pocahontas, Fantasia2000, Dinosaur, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Everyone’s Hero, and Meet the Robinsons. Leland has a BFA from RISD (Rhode Island School of Design).
Interview: Blue Fang Talks Bringing Animals To Life With AI, Animation Collaboration
September 2, 2009
World of Zoo Logo
Recently I did an interview with my coworkers Bruce and Lee for Gamasutra. We talked about our approach to implementing animal AI in the upcoming game World of Zoo.
Here’s the text:
Interview: Blue Fang Talks Bringing Animals To Life With AI, Animation Collaboration
Waltham, MA-based Blue Fang likes working with animals. The developer of the top-selling Zoo Tycoon franchise for Microsoft is now working on World of Zoo for THQ.
The passionate team has developed an interesting collaborative tactic to help bring their animals to life, and are finishing up World Of Zoo for an apparent end-of-year release on Wii, DS and PC.
In this interview, we sit down with AI lead Steve Gargolinski, senior scientist Bruce Blumberg, and animation director Lee Hepler to discuss their unique philosophy on AI, the relationship between their departments, and how their teamwork means more believable characters.
You guys have said you’re proud of your interdisciplinary collaboration. You overlap AI and behavior with animation — how does that work?
Lee Hepler: We [build the behavior graphs] as an integrated part of animation, so that all those things sort of inform each other. Tons of animations end up on the cutting room floor, so to speak, because they work well as animations but they don’t fit with the actual behavior that we’re offering them to.
Bruce Blumberg: Yeah, we are focused on the end user experience, and that end user experience is that… we want them to feel as if they’re interacting with sentient beings.
And so at the end of the day, animators are all about convincing people that the characters that they’re seeing have an inner mental life. So, they’re the experts [on] that. Our job on the AI side is to support art in communicating that inner world, if you will, of the characters.
And Steve has a great line about AI is really about providing the opportunity to show sweet animation — because it’s really the animations and how they move that’s really communicating, “Oh, I want something from the player,” or “I’m sad,” or whatever.
Steve Gargolinski: Yeah. One of my main philosophies on working on this is just to get out of Lee’s way as much as possible, and let the cool animations come through. Especially with our target demographic, when making game AI, there’s always a lot of draws to do complicated stuff that the user might not notice.
We really try to focus in on giving the stuff that kids and the more casual market would be interested in. So, the three main things we’re really focused on are showing kids sweet animations of these animals, letting them see cool things for them to do.
The second thing would be making sure that things always respond to the player. We really put a lot of work into making sure that when you’re doing something, the animal will pay attention to you, and it never felt like he was ignoring you or didn’t see you, or anything like that.
And then the third thing is to just make sure that they don’t look stupid. No circling, no obviously blatant dumb stuff that really takes away their organic credibility, which was… I know Lee likes to talk about this, all the illusional life stuff and how the organic credibility lets players build their…
Lee Hepler: Well, yeah… the basic mechanics of the world are constantly reminding you that this is just a jumping, fake animal. You can have that lead into the coolest animation in the world, but if the walk cycle and the locomotion through the world and the little second-to second-responses [aren't there] … you’ve ruined the illusion before that can have an effect.
So, it’s really, really important to have the animation working and getting a really solid palette of clean, well-functioning basic AI that the player doesn’t question or even think about because it’s so well-realized.
Bruce Blumberg: I think one of our real philosophies from day one was the notion that our job is really to provide scaffolding so that the player can build these rich models about what’s going on in the character.
And so they’re the ones who are creating the story, and what we’re doing is providing the hints to where the scaffolding allows them to do that. So we’ve really gone, just as Lee says, for if it’s not readable, don’t do it. If the player can’t see it or if we can’t communicate it, don’t build the machinery under the hood.
Speaking of machinery, how do you build that?
Steve Gargolinski: The challenge we had in figuring out what system we needed to support all this stuff is we’re dealing with eleven very different animals in eleven very different environments, and we need to supply the player with intimate reactions with all of them.
So, our approach was… We implemented something called the Animal X Engine, where we decide what we wanted the high level play patterns to be, the base logic that all the animals would share. So the player, if he moves from animal to animal, would be able to identify some things that they have in common.
The ones who are hungry get happy when you feed them. The ones who like to play get happy when you toss a ball into the exhibit, things like that. And then what we did is we used Havok as our middleware. With using Havok Behavior, we were able to make a pretty serious abstraction between the game logic that I was just talking about and what we actually ended up using for animations to act out the game logic.
So, with a setup like that, it gave Lee a lot of flexibility for how he could fill out different sections of the graph to really give a lot of different variety to a lot of different animals without really changing base logic so that we wouldn’t use organic credibility by having something broken happen at some point along the line.
How does your cross-collaboration between animation and AI work simply from a practical standpoint?
Bruce Blumberg: One of the things that has worked really well at Blue Fang is the AI team, which is Lee and the artists and all, are all in what we call the pit, so we’re right next to each other.
One of the things that was really great is we would often find artistic solutions to technical problems, and then technical solutions to artistic problems.
Did you go from, say, waterfall to agile? Or did you just decide to be collaborative and open, and this methodology grew naturally out of that?
Lee Hepler: I think a big part of it is we started working pretty well together, and we started getting results. Quite frankly, at the beginning, it was like an R&D project from the get-go. We were figuring out stuff on the fly, minute-to-minute, and there was just really no way to schedule in a traditional way what we were trying to do.
We started to work together, we worked well together. We delivered and promised big chunks of work as opposed to broken down…. We were delivering the overall functionality. On the production side, there was a lot of trust involved in allowing us to do that. I think we were all really into it, which is what made it work.
I have to feel fine about just going up to Steve and saying, “Steve, this is totally broken. This looks like junk.”
Steve Gargolinski: He’s usually right. [laughs] He’s always right.
Lion Pride Released
August 11, 2009
My company, Blue Fang Games, just released our first iPhone game: Lion Pride. It’s a quick, fun game about drawing lines across the world to coordinate Lioness hunting patterns. Catch various game in order to keep your babies fed!
There’s a review here on Touch Arcade, which is my personal go-to site for iPhone game reviews. They seemed to like it!
Lion Pride Promo
Knights Onrush Review
July 14, 2009
Knights Onrush isn’t just another tower defense game for the iPhone. This one isn’t about setting up a gauntlet of automated defense systems to protect your castle, but rather about giving the player some tools to use actively and keep the approaching enemies at bay.
Knights Onrush Screenshot
As the opposition rushes onto the screen, you have a few different ways to dispatch them. The most straightforward way is to pick them up with your finger and flick the bad guy up into the air – not even a catapult, wizard, or fully-armored knight can survive a fall like that. Each enemy that you dispose of gives up a few gold pieces, which you can use to purchase upgrades in between stages. Upgrades include stronger castle gates and a variety of weapons to make your fantasy stereotype slaying easier.
The purchased weapons are not automated attacks, but rather resources for you to deal out more damage. You get a giant rock to drop from above, a pillar to smash repeatedly up and down across the battlefield, fireballs, ice cannons, flamethrowers, and giant ballistae. These weapons are all involved, satisfying, and fun. I’m not a huge fan of the ballista, it seems really hard to aim, but the rest of the weapons get the thumbs up.
There are two different currencies in Knights Onrush to purchase these upgrades: gold and souls. Wiping out monsters accumulates gold in a straightforward way, but stealing their souls requires a little bit more effort. Early upgrade options include a giant hook and some sort of covered pit. If you pick up an enemy and hang him from the hook, then a dragon swoops down for a snack and adds a soul to your collection. If you drop an enemy into the covered pit, then after a few seconds a huge flame pillar erupts and you get your soul. Collect a few of these souls and you open up your options in the store. This creates an interesting balance in the game, as you try to divide your time productively between wiping out enemies and turning them into dragon food.
Enemies in this game are varied and just plain cool. You’ve got your standard troops, heavily armored knights, guys on horseback, wizards, catapults, dudes carrying bombs, invisible assassins, and more. Each of these enemies plays out a bit differently and requires different strategy to take down effectively. The graphics on these guys are awesome, everything is colorful and fun. This entire game is very visually appealing.
If any of this sounds appealing to you, then pick it up in the App Store. I think this one is usually $2.99, but right now it’s on sale for $0.99. Highly recommended!
Duels of the Planeswalkers Review
July 14, 2009
Duels of the Planeswalkers Logo
I write a weekly article for puremtgo.com. Last week I included a review of the XBox Live Arcade game Magic: the Gathering – Duels of the Planeswalkers. You can read it here.