On November 15th, I’ll be speaking about combat design and AI in Uncharted 4 at the Montreal International Game Summit. My talk explores how we navigated the extremes of combat design philosophy (tightly authored vs fully systems-driven) throughout Uncharted 4‘s development, and how we found our best results with a hybrid approach.
Ahead of my talk, I did a short interview with Brendan Sinclair at GamesIndustry. We discussed a number of topics related to AI design, including why our early attempt at a simple point-to-point search behaviour failed:
“In another instance, they used some pathfinding AI from The Last of Us to get enemies from point A to point B. Gallant said it was soon clear that the AI worked especially well in The Last of Us because the game’s tight, complex environments ensured that the enemies would traverse environments in mostly human ways, using aisles and doorways, walking around desks and other obstacles in the layout. But in Uncharted 4‘s larger, more open layouts, moving from point A to point B usually meant travelling in a perfectly straight line, which wasn’t terribly interesting.”
“The solution was to run paths throughout the layout that AI would move along, trails that would have them reasonably making their way throughout the level, perhaps clearing out corners or other places the player could be hiding on the way to their destination.”
Attending MIGS this year is also a nice homecoming for me. Not only was I born and raised in Montreal, I was actually a student volunteer at MIGS way back in 2009. It’s a real honour to be able to come back as a speaker seven years later.
You can catch my talk at 3:45 PM in room 519A on Tuesday November 15th. If you’re attending MIGS, I hope you’ll swing by to say hello!
Disclosure: As a speaker, MIGS is covering my flight & accommodation during the conference.
