had a few cases where NPCs were going to need to jump across small gaps, but we
quickly realized we did not have enough to justify the programming involved in getting
the NPCs to jump. Analyzing the situations where jumping was required, we were eas-
ily able to rework areas to eliminate a few jumps. The ones we could not remove, we
were able to solve with a scripted jumping action for the NPCs that could be performed
in those spots only. This required some tedious debugging on the design side, but in the
end was much simpler than implementing a general-purpose jump behavior.
How Good Is Good Enough?........................
Damage IncorporatedandThe Sufferingsuggest another interesting point about the
sophistication that will be required of AI in different games. What made the work on
these games so challenging was the fact that players were counting on the AI to per-
form certain actions for them. InDamage Incorporated, if players ordered a teammate to
move to a certain position, they expected that trooper to reach that position and defend
it. If the AI failed to do so, players might die as a result, and would curse the AI for fail-
ing them. Even worse, if players ordered the AI to relocate to a specific position and the
trooper had difficulty getting there, players would become frustrated, especially when
the appropriate path to that location was completely obvious to players. But if an enemy
AI agent had trouble finding a path to a location, players would never be the wiser. If an
opponent got stuck in a corner on rare occasions, players would be all too happy to
exploit the AI agent’s stupidity by mowing down the stuck foe with a blast of machine
gun fire. However, if a teammate got stuck in a corner, he would be unable to follow
players to the end of the level. Since players could not finish a level unless their entire
squad was in the “Extraction Zone” for that level, the AI’s mistakes would end the play-
ers’ games prematurely. Nothing frustrates players more than dying because of faulty
teammate AI.
One can take a couple of lessons away from the problems I had with the AI imple-
mentation onDamage Incorporated. The first is to never do a game with teammates in a
Chapter 9: Artificial Intelligence 167
In a game with
teammates, such as
Damage Incorporated,
the failure of the AI
agents to work as the
player expects seriously
impedes the player’s
ability to play the game.