AI cooperation systems in games are one of those things players usually notice only when they fail. When they work well, the experience feels smooth and almost invisible: your squadmate…
I’ve thrown exactly one controller in my life. It was during a particularly brutal section of Ninja Gaiden on Xbox, and the moment that controller left my hands, I knew…
AI social interaction systems are no longer a futuristic concept tucked away in research labs. They’re already embedded in the way people shop, learn, bank, seek support, and even keep…
There’s a moment in every game developer’s career when they realize that making one NPC act intelligently is challenging but making ten NPCs act intelligently together is an entirely different…
There’s a moment in Middle-earth: Shadow of War that I still think about. I was hunting a particular orc captain when one of his buddies someone I’d fought before showed…
The first time I witnessed a procedural storytelling system create something genuinely surprising, I was playing a heavily modded session of Dwarf Fortress. A dwarf named Urist became possessed, crafted…
The first time a truly random event caught me off guard in a game, I was playing Dwarf Fortress about a decade ago. My carefully planned fortress was humming along…
I’ve lost count of how many randomly generated game maps I’ve seen that technically work but feel completely soulless. You know the type dungeons where rooms connect in ways that…
There’s a particular kind of dread that sets in when you’re replaying a puzzle game you loved years ago. You remember the solutions. That brilliant “aha!” moment when you figured…
I still remember the first time I noticed something was off about a character climbing stairs in an older game. Their feet would hover slightly above each step, moving through…
Mastan