![]() ![]() ![]() "These techniques were extremely powerful to allow us to create a dynamic living character in BioShock Infinite as a result we made the player feel more like a participant in the world and less like an observer," Abercrombie said. Elizabeth would also point out enemies that may be sneaking up behind players or not directly in their line of sight. Elizabeth would now call players when she had items and point out enemy challenges they may have been unaware of, such as approaching opponents. When the item toss mechanic began working well, Irrational added call-outs - ways for her to get players' attention. Once she got within a certain distance of Booker, developers made her choose the best path towards him that would be out of players' way. This resulted in the team moving her off screen and out of the way, but if she did stay on screen and move closer to the player, developers scripted her to avoid players' line of fire. This was problematic because she would run through a player's field of fire to find cover, a jarring occurrence that made her seem like less of a realistic character as she blasted through bullets and explosions. In initial combat design, Elizabeth would either be on screen the entire time or too far away. Her behavior was exaggerated without making her seem too ridiculous she would utter "hmm" or sigh in order to get the player's attention without being obnoxious. Once they had Elizabeth on a "smart" walking path, the team added the ability for her to find and point out items as well as inspect and comment on things in the world. This tweak solved Elizabeth's blocking problem, but developers still had to craft her "performance" and how she would explore and interact with the environment.Įlizabeth's debugging mode was called "WTFLIZ."Ībercrombie also showed footage of an early-stage Elizabeth, running in her own AI debugging mode titled "WTFLIZ." "But having her move too far ahead was impersonal, and having her too close would allow players to blast past her."Ībercrombie said that Elizabeth does teleport closer to players if they move too far ahead, but not too close - "too close is too creepy," he noted. "We wanted Elizabeth to keep her distance while the player is moving," Abercrombie said. "Our next idea was to predict a location for Elizabeth based on players' movement, but this was extremely difficult to make look good." Abercrombie said developers eventually settled on tweaking Elizabeth's reactiveness to keep her between the player and the fixed location of their next goal. "Following the player was not going to work," he said. In some testing, Abercrombie said Elizabeth's scripted AI would walk away from players but then players would try to follow her, resulting in a "comedy of errors." This is when Irrational knew they had to fine-tune her AI to be more proactive and prevent this loop from happening. Also, having a companion that only followed Booker around would have been the wrong choice, Abercrombie said. It would have been an impossible task in an unscripted open world. The greatest challenge in designing Elizabeth was determining how she would move through the world in non-combat situations. Irrational kept these two ideals in mind when designing Elizabeth. Abercrombie also said designing game AI includes some aspects of theater, including exaggerated gestures and improvisation. Gamers only understand the game world through the "pixels on the screen and the sounds from the speakers." Things must be explicitly shown or "they never happened," he said, noting players will need to see to believe. One of Irrational's pillars is for developers to be "player facing," to see their work from the point of view of the gamer. "I haven't done anything as challenging or as satisfying as the work I did in the last eight months on BioShock Infinite," Abercrombie said of his work on Elizabeth. He said making her "live" so players would invest in and become attached to her was one of the programming team's greatest challenges - and one of the great challenges in Abercrombie's own career. Speaking in a panel at GDC today, former Irrational Games lead programmer John Abercrombie said designing Elizabeth was no small task. The AI for BioShock Infinite's Elizabeth was designed to both follow and lead, to be reactive to protagonist Booker and also proactive in pushing players through the story. ![]()
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