player decide to build more units, and how many will it make? Will the AI pick up on and
defend against different attack types performed by the players, such as flanking maneu-
vers? Is the enemy AI supposed to be a real match for players or is balance achieved
because the computer simply has more powerful equipment? If necessary, you can pro-
vide a walk-through of a single game experience and how the enemy AI would behave at
different junctures of that game.
Working on the Artificial Intelligence section is a good place to enlist the help of
programmers on your team. Find out what sorts of AI they have experience working
with, and explore how that might be applicable to your project. Find out what is difficult
to accomplish and what is easy. It is often hard for a designer (especially if she is a
non-programmer) to comprehend that getting an AI agent to flee when wounded is a
trivial task, while getting it to pathfind up some stairs and jump over a ledge can be
extremely difficult. Instead of going for pie-in-the-sky notions of what you would like
the AI in your game to be capable of, work only with real, accomplishable goals.
Remember that a programmer who reads a design document filled with descriptions of
implausible AI that is in no way grounded in reality is likely to become irritated at the
document, and it will be a challenge for that document to be taken seriously in the
future. Having a programmer work with you on the game’s AI documentation will help
make that section of your document that much stronger, as well as assuring that the AI
programmer really understands what is expected of the agents in the game.
In working on your Artificial Intelligence section, try to follow the same rules you
did when writing the Game Mechanics section. Do not refer to specific NPCs in the
game, but rather to general behaviors that different agents may exhibit. You will get to
the specific NPCs and what set of behaviors they will use in the Game Elements sec-
tion later in the document. Again, try not to assume anything. Put in as much detail as
you can about how the agents in your game will behave, even if it seems obvious to you.
368 Chapter 19: The Design Document
Describing the
collaborative tactics the
AI will use is very
important in the design
document for strategy
games such asWarCraft
II.