The Indie Developers Who Are Using AI to Make Living Cities, Tactics Machines, and More
City of Gangsters is a mafia game that simulates a city full of people interacting during a fictional 1920s Prohibition. The characters in City of Gangsters are supposed to react to the player in ways that appear to be organic and period-accurate – a feeling that strictly scripted interactions would never be able to encapsulate.
So, like many developers over the years before him, SomaSim founder and CTO Rob Zubek turned to AI to make a realistic city.
“We simulate a city populated by all sorts of characters, who have various relationships and histories with each other,” he explained. “And our AI system lets us find interesting relationships and act on them. For example, we can ask the system to find us people who should start a vendetta against the player. We could express something like ‘find me someone whose family member was recently killed by the player’, except we write it in logic notation rather than in English, and then do something interesting with the result.”
Des Gayle, game director at Hidden Titan, is making a story-focused, action-RPG called The Hellbrand in Unreal Engine 5. One of the ways Gayle is using AI in development is effectively as a tactics machine that pays attention to how a player is fighting, and adjusts the behavior of enemies accordingly. It even allows enemy soldiers who escape an encounter with a player to inform other units of their behavior so that, and future groups of enemies might come prepared. For instance, if a player is using a lot of close combat attacks, but an enemy escapes, future waves might include more long-range attackers.
Zubek and Gayle number among the many developers experimenting with AI, which has been a hot topic in 2023 as media personalities, tech analysts, and
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