Mindflock.com

AI Summit Panel

This last few weeks we were over at GDC as part of the AI summit. We had two full days of AI discussion which was pretty wide ranging in content. Phil did two presentations, one on social behavior and another on some “tales from the trenches” under the name “Little big AI”. The big takeaway from the GDC as a whole, is that games are diverse in nature. On the high end, we saw presentations about using driven ragdolls (powered by Havok physics and animation products) in Just Cause 2. On the other end of the spectrum, we saw many indie games on the IGF stand and plenty of social games in attendance (particularly interesting was Daniel James’s talk about Three Rings facebook game experiments).

So we’re left with a feeling of wanting to work on high end 3D animation and low end flash-based facebook social simulation!

Having a quick poke through the Facebook API and how we can tie flash into it (via adobe flex) seems like it would be fun to experiment with. So its likely we will do some work on that. but will also continue work on the behavior tree code library and work on pushing box mental in a new direction. Box Mental is our 3D game/experiment and following some feedback from Sony, we decided that the concept was too hard to explain and understand as it was. It feels like we need to join the dots somewhere and actually work on something that does both high-end 3D and low end flash in a way that works with the same core gameplay and backend infrastructure. We have a background in network and distributed systems code, so it feels natural that we will bring some of that into play. We are considering how we might use either google’s appengine and/or amazon EC2 to power the backend. The key of course is to find a simple mechanic that works across a range of platforms, has a core online element but that works scalably and asychronously and that still has interesting complexities that can be controlled by AI direction.

More on all this once we have some ideas prototyped out.

2009 Conference

So we’ll be at the Paris game AI conference in June (23/24th).

More details on the conference itself is available here

This conference is very much focussed on practical AI techniques for developers of all sizes. Last year we had a blast and we’re hoping for some brilliant content for this years conference too. It takes place in Paris which is lovely at that time of year too!

Hope to see you there!

Phil.

Bah, we didn’t get the money from GITG. But it doesn’t really matter, because we can self-fund anyway.

After Xmas we should be on with some more anims for the characters. The first pass of the smart object system will be done and we’ll have the first test version of the city gen to look at.

Last week we got some mocap working from the mocap rig. It was pretty exciting to see Gabe in his silly black jumpsuit with all the IR balls on. But you can so easily tell that mocap data is human. There’s a research paper right there!

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year!

Phil.

And now back to our regular programming.

What did we learn?

This last few weeks have seen MindFlock hard at work on solidifying the concept for Box Mental. That hard work finalized in a pitch at Sony Liverpool’s studio one last thursday. The whole process of trying to prepare the pitch (which is really a pitch FOR a pitch) has been very interesting. Not least because it forced us to try and understand what was important to convey about the game and our vision of what it will end up as. There are a few practical issues that came up that are really hard lessons learnt:

• Don’t try and present something like a flashy video, unless you have a flashy video designer on hand
• If you are going to create some additional materials, make sure you prepare them well ahead of time
• People use powerpoint because its fast to produce SOMETHING

The truth of some of this effort, will become apparent in a few weeks when they announce the winners of the competition (it was a competition to win funds to create the pitch, so in essence it was a pitch for a pitch).

Never the less, we are forging ahead with new developments. Primarily cleaning up and refactoring the codebase a bit to ensure that it can be worked on by more people. That means securing it in a subversion repository rather than the current mercurial one. Also it means branching off for a couple of potential technology prototypes that need to be built to enable some of the gameplay.

Luckily, with all the get in the game stuff out of the way, the regular schedule can be resumed. Both on here and on britishindie.com (site about british indie companies funnily enough).

Next time, we’ll talk technology!

.Z.