Hey everyone,

 

First off, thanks again for your feedback and comments the first, of no doubt many, AI related blogs.

 

So what has been going on lately with Dark Void….what haven't we been up to?!?!

 

The team has been working hard on getting our levels locked down and into the art pipeline. This has been a super collaborative effort between the design team, art team, team leads, etc. At some point we’ll do a full blog or two on our level design philosophy, but I’ll share a small smidge right now.

 

Everyone following Dark Void by now has seen the gameplay footage that came out during the E3 time frame. Although we’re very proud of our demo for E3, that’s just what it was, a demo. As such, we made a very structured flow, with a deliberate pace to show off each and every one of our mechanics, one after another.

 

For those that missed it, it went like this. (Now with animals!)

 

Shoot enemies on the ground

 

 

Hovering Death from Above

 

Shoot enemies on the ground

 

Vertical Combat Awesomeness

 

Shoot enemies on the ground

 

Jetpack dogfight Awesomeness

 

UFO Skyjack

 

 

Sneak Peak Archon boss fight

 

These images made funnier if you know the demo…check out the video online

 

www.gametrailers.com/game/5681.html

Ok, so the demo was cooler than that flow makes it seem, way cooler, but not as cool as if we had made it using animals as our characters (can you tell its Friday?).

 

All in all, I felt the demo did a great job at hitting our goals. But being structured such as it was, I think it gave the false impression that our game was going to be a very linear progression of those gameplay elements through our level flows.

 

Very far from the truth!

 

Now, we are by no means an open world game, but that demo flow is far from what we consider the ideal way to celebrate having a very cool character, with an extremely cool jet pack, kick ass and take names in the Void.

 

The jetpack really provides a lot of player freedom, as such, making sure our levels support that freedom is crucial. Making sure we are creating an experience that can cater to those that like to run and gun,  cover users, people who take to the skies to rain death from above, and those that love it all, well…that is the real trick, isn’t it. I think we’re getting closer to the goal though.

 

Right now, after taking  a bit of time to let Will get settled into The Void, it’s not too long before we put the player in the driver’s seat and let them try out their favorite tactics (as for myself, I am partial to “Death from Above”

 

Hey, while we’re on the topic of levels, and to help put to rest some of the things I’ve read about D/V being nothing but Grey’s and Brown’s on the color spectrum (somewhere there is an alien joke in that last sentence, I just can’t find it). Here is a concept piece from one of the level’s we’ve been working on lately.

 

 

 

 

Hope you like it! Feel free to ask some questions about what you are looking at in the comments sections, I’ll share what I can (apologies ahead of time for cryptic answers).

 

 

 - Morgan

 

Hey guys,

 

Jason Hail, our intrepid AI programmer over @ Airtight, has written a small peek at Dark Void through the lense of AI. Here it is...

 

Howdy, Jason Hail checking in. I'm the Senior AI programmer at Airtight Games working on Dark Void. This last year has been a whirlwind of activity for us AI guys, and let me tell you: this game is big! We have ground combat, vehicular combat, aerial jet-pack based combat, vertical combat and some more surprises I can't even talk about yet. One of the big challenges for me is to keep a handle on all of the different elements we have in order to stay focused on the core gameplay mechanics that make Dark Void great. It helps to look at the games that inspired Dark Void, and to pick apart what made them work. There's one common thread I found in those games: great gameplay comes from iteration. You think really hard about how to make something fun. You polish the idea for months in your head. Then you try it in game. And, sadly, as great as it was in your head . it sucks to play. So, you have to start again. You come up with a better idea. A bit more cautiously, you try it in game. It no longer sucks; now it's even kind of fun. So you refine it, let others play it, tune it based on their feedback. Now it's even more fun. And so on, until you have a final product that absorbs the player from the moment they press START. Diagram 1. My highly scientific diagram of the evolution of awesome game play. Those first 4 steps can repeat for quite a long time.

 

OK, you say, So more work makes the game better. Tell me something I don’t know, n00b.

Well, the trick is how do you pack the most iterations into the tight schedule of making the game? Around the beginning of this year, it became apparent that with all the cool gameplay ideas we had for Dark Void we desperately needed a structure for creating and testing new AI quickly. I began reading a lot about different AI models, and one structural idea kept popping up: Behavior Trees. So, what's a Behavior Tree?

A Behavior Tree is a structure that breaks complex decisions down into a series of small choices, which yield a set of concrete actions for your AI to carry out. As always, an (somewhat silly) example tells the story:

Imagine you're a hungry AI. You have no sandwich, and worse yet you have no car! What to do? Well, you could get a sandwich from the fridge, but if you forgot to go shopping your fridge is empty. You have no car, so you need to find one. Maybe your parents would let you borrow theirs? If you drive like me, the answer is "probably not." So, you'll need to trick - oops, I mean convince - a friend to help you out. Maybe they'll let you borrow their car? If not, perhaps they'd give you a lift to the store?

Our AI isn't so concerned about sandwiches, but they are quite interested in killing you and your fellow Survivors. So, they approach the problem in much the same way: Do I have an enemy? If so, what means do I have to dispatch him? Am I hurt, and do I care that I'm hurt? Is there someplace strategically better to fight from? Questions yield even more specific questions, which in turn arrive at one or more actions to take to satisfy the problem at hand. At all times, the AI monitors the outcome of its choices. The AI can adapt the plan to changing world conditions, even remembering things for the future like, "How did that plan turn out last time? Did I succeed, or fail miserably?

We AI guys dream about stuff like making their AI totally self-aware and self-sufficient. However, designers still want to be in charge of finessing the game - and rightly so! Tell a designer the AI is going to go off and think for itself entirely and you'll have one panicky designer. Our toolkit includes a home-grown Behavior Tree editor that allows designers to build and tune and preview their AI in (say it with me now) real-time. Along the way, as we add ever richer behaviors for the AI, the design team can pick and choose how and where to drop it in. Since there's just one of me and there's a LOT of AI to build for this game, it puts design in the driver's seat and allows me to sit back and do important stuff like sit in meetings (just kidding, boss!).

I'll try to write again soon. Thanks for reading along, and of course if you want to know more feel free to comment here. For now, a deadline looms and I have AI to teach. "Kill, boy! Kill! Good boy. Goooooood Watcher."

Later,

Jason