Charting AI, animation in Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

PS3-exclusive Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is to be released next month already. Have you got your expectations charted? Now, speaking for the development staff at Naughty Dog, AI and Animation programmer Christian Gyrling gives us the low down of how his side of development went about. A recent PlayStation Blog post of his talks of their development process in the AI and character animation in Drake’s Fortune.

As it turns out, Naught Dog’s division of animators is quite small. With the manpower that they had, the team had to make the most of their development time by making the AI simple. Their goal “was to make the AI ‘seem’ smart […] without making the code complex.” So, without having spent a large amount of time on complex AI codes, they were able to redirect their efforts to character animation. After some process of elimination wherein they tried to deduce which parts of gameplay players would look at, Gyrling and his team were able to make their move.

We found that enemies getting hit and dying made up a large portion, and a fun one. Other areas were enemies entering combat, attacking from cover positions and, what we call, open combat – enemies standing in the open shooting at you.

This set the direction of their efforts in giving “the player a rich experience by being selective in which areas to add variety.” True enough, they were able to create hundreds of animations per enemy unit – which means, less repetition in enemy movement. And all this resulted in, in Christian Gyrling’s words, “the smooth and believable characters in Uncharted.”

PS3-exclusive Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is to be released next month already. Have you got your expectations charted? Now, speaking for the development staff at Naughty Dog, AI and Animation programmer Christian Gyrling gives us the low down of how his side of development went about. A recent PlayStation Blog post of his talks of their development process in the AI and character animation in Drake’s Fortune.

As it turns out, Naught Dog’s division of animators is quite small. With the manpower that they had, the team had to make the most of their development time by making the AI simple. Their goal “was to make the AI ‘seem’ smart […] without making the code complex.” So, without having spent a large amount of time on complex AI codes, they were able to redirect their efforts to character animation. After some process of elimination wherein they tried to deduce which parts of gameplay players would look at, Gyrling and his team were able to make their move.

We found that enemies getting hit and dying made up a large portion, and a fun one. Other areas were enemies entering combat, attacking from cover positions and, what we call, open combat – enemies standing in the open shooting at you.

This set the direction of their efforts in giving “the player a rich experience by being selective in which areas to add variety.” True enough, they were able to create hundreds of animations per enemy unit – which means, less repetition in enemy movement. And all this resulted in, in Christian Gyrling’s words, “the smooth and believable characters in Uncharted.”