Game Design and Artificial Intelligence - Bournemouth University

Game Design and Artificial Intelligence
David Hopkins
memory of previous events once you have moved into a different area and they solely react based
on the players social attributes.
“ The worst kind of game are those (usually adventure games) in which it'sobvious that the
designer thought he he was writing a film or a novel. It'sthe frustrated author syndrome, and you
know you're bearing the brunt of it when your choices in the game have shrunk to one linear path,
or when you find yourself scrolling through never ending cutscene dialogues waiting to get to the
action. These designers are entertaining nobody but themselves.”
Dave Morris and Andrew Rollings [Rollings00]
An engaging and believable story is one good way of drawing in the players attention, a good
example of this is nintendo’ s “Z elda” series and all through the “final fantasy” series. The one
setback to this is that the main story is often a linear event, and is not affected by the methods of
how a player has gone through the story. Fable yet again has adhered to this, and has two potential
endings , with both an ending for an evil and holy individual, although you are still forced to fight
the inevitable final battle at the end. “Escap e Velocity: EV Nova” goes one better than this, and has
a choice of six stories which support the main exploratory trading adventure.
Many games now implement main stories with plenty of smaller stories and side quests. These help
add a lot more detail to the game world and give the player options as to whether he wishes to fulfill
these quests. “B aldurs Gate” utilizes this idea, and it certainly adds character to the world, but the
main story is far too linear and there are many occasions where you are forced into encounters, or
along specific routes.
One of the main features of the concept is that man management will be key. One of the best
current examples of this is the “championship manager” series by Eidos, or more recently
“F ootball Manager 2005” by Sega. The main objective is to manage your football team through to
league and cup success through shrewd market purchases and tactics. However this game also
involves several interesting man management techniques. The players can be very temperamental
at times, going through both good and bad patches of form regularly. Players that haven'tbeen
selected for games recently may hand in transfer requests and become unhappy, affecting their
overall performance in games. Other events similar to this can occur. All of them have been built
around the player and could be avoided if the game was restarted. This is a terrific example of how
the crew should be during the game.
All of the games mentioned in this section have a lot that can be learned from, and hopefully much
of this can be incorporated into the design and implementation. Though it is easy to get carried
away at this point, it is best to try and keep things simple.
Background Story
The galaxy was once forged by a relationship between two races, the Orains and the
Hwetrese. The Orains discovered the knowledge of the “ LightDrive” which allows spaceships to
travel faster than the speed of light by converting a ship into molecules of light matter. Through
this invention, the Orains become a race of discoverers and explorers and began setting up colonies
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