Game Brains

This assignment was inspired by an article in the August issue of Game Developer magazine (www.gdmag.com) entitled "Game Brains", which very briefly reviewed eight current AI middleware systems.

The purpose of this assignment is to give you a chance to test your own broad understanding of game AI techniques and also to give you some practice presenting these ideas to a technical audience.

Each of you has been randomly assigned one AI middleware system to research and evaluate (either one of the eight in the magazine, or one of three more I have located). Imagine that you are the lead AI programmer in a game company and you have been asked to consider buying the AI middleware system in question for your next big project.

You will have 3 minutes to make your presentation, followed by a 1 minute question and speaker transition period. The instructor will hold the clicker to sequence between slides (no animations), and will warn you when you have 1 minute left in your presentation time.

Please prepare a maximum of four slides. The first slide should be a title slide, which includes the following information:

• Your name
• Name and logo (if available) of middleware system
• Name and location of company that makes the system
• URL for system/company
• Brief description of the imaginary game project which would make the system you are evaluating the most desirable

• What does the system do?
• What AI techniques does it use?
• What is the most impressive thing it does?
• What does the system not do? (AI things, not wash windows :-)
• The following information may not be available for all systems:
  • System cost
  • Size of user community
  • Games it has been used on
• One or more screen shots and why you chose them
• What platforms does it run on? (if already given in GDMag, confirm by your own research)

What to Turn In

• Zip file containing your four presentation slides in either PowerPoint or PDF format.
• NB: Late submissions will not be given presentation time.

Grading

• 3 points - Content (completeness, clarity, evidence of research and thought)

• 1 point - Graphic quality of slides (legible, grammatical, well-organized, etc.)

• 1 point - Live presentation skills (clear, audible, don't read slides, etc.)

Please post any questions to the myWPI forum for the course.