Less A, More I: Putting More Intelligence Into Our AI

The Bard's Tale Developer Diary #6
By Annie Sullivan, Engineer at inXile entertainment

It was four years ago, but I remember it like it was yesterday. My first video game artificial intelligence (AI). It was for a creature called the chikkit. I had spent lots of time on the low-level AI of the game, implementing a pathfinder, full vision and hearing, a system for passing messages and events to the AI, and anything else the AI could possibly need. So I was really excited to get started working on the actual AIs for the individual creatures. I went into my office and coded and debugged until I finished the first version of the AI. I was pretty happy with it, until people started coming into my office to try it out. Invariably, the conversation would go something like this: