First off, let me tell you a little bit about how this game came together. I’m currently finishing up my bachelor thesis regarding a fundamental analysis of the staging of an AI-companion using the well-known example of Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioShock_Infinite). I basically gathered information from interviews and observations on Elizabeth’s behaviour and tried to work out some basic routines or rules. To substantiate my observations I had to create sort of a proof-of-concept so I decided to put together a short, demonstrational project for me to use in a usability test, to measure how well certain requirements are met. In the scenario, you’re a captive in a futuristic facility that tries to escape with the help of Malvin, the AI-controlled companion which is the central piece of the project. The aim was to create a supporting character that the player bonds to and has an autonomic feel to it.
Also, I always wanted to do something in Unreal and this seemed to be the perfect opportunity to do so and it really paid off!
I’m almost done with the test-sessions, but apart from my bachelor-thesis I’d just like to share this little short with the community and I’m very open for discussions and feedback regarding it! I want to annotate, that there certainly are some rough edges to the project. Naturally, I didn’t have the resources Irrational Games had to make Elizabeth, especially regarding animations and I had to finish the project within a month to be on schedule (which I managed to do, yayy). I only relied on Starter Content and content from some example projects, with a few exceptions.
So, to cut a long story short: Please have a look at it and I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on it! You can also find me on Twitter.
Thanks to A. for putting up an afternoon to create an additional animation I reaally needed and of course Epic Games for Unreal Engine 4 and to you, reading or (hopefully) playing this short
Hey, would you mind sharing your information on Elizabeths AI?
I just finished the main game again and i really loved the way she worked.
Want to have a similar AI companion in my game later on.
EDIT: Just played your game and it is way too dark. Most of the time i’m moving blind >.<
And i was able to walk around the part where he talks about the “camera” thing being able to
analyze materia and i shouldn’t get too close. I didn’t know what to do and walked around it, falling
down into the z Kill and broke the game xD
Some people have told me that aswell, regarding the game being too dark :S Now it makes sense why most games implement a brightness-calibration-setup before starting. You weren’t supposed to walk towards that camera, but I noticed that a lot of people got too lost in that section. I’ll possibly have to revise that. Thank you for your feedback!
I could share my thesis after filing it in next month. It’s written in German, but since you’re from Germany I guess that won’t be a problem I’ll have to write an abstract for it in English, but that’s all I could share with you english-speaking fellow gamedevs out there. But you’ll find that the basic principles are far away from being anything overly complex, most of it - as Luke Dicken (google him!) described it in Infinite’s case is smoke and mirrors. You’ll find yourself often optimizing the behaviour for certain special situations to make it behave in a way you want it to. There are also a lot of design-choices that greatly affect the way the player perceives the companion. One example being Elizabeth tries to stay in your view, which I tried to recreate by having Malvin find navigation points in front of the player to which he can walk to. But generally it was more of a game design effort than a technical one, with this approach.
Updated the project with a few bugfixes and changes (see the link in the initial post)
For those who are interested: I’ve finished up a short abstract on the thesis itself in english. There is some basic information regarding the fundamental compounds of the AI-companion in it, which could help someone interested to get in the right direction. Feel free to read it over here.
