I've been a long time member of gamedev (been lurking since about 2000 or early 2001), though I've never been a frequent poster. I am currently at Startup Weekend in Dublin. For anyone not familiar with Startup Weekend, the idea is that people form small teams and basically launch a startup - that is, come up with a concept, validate it, build a business model, build a proof-of-concept product, market it and pitch it to venture capitalists - all in 52 hours!
My group is working on a game AI/analytics middleware project for competitive online games and I was hoping some people who either work in game development or are developing games as a hobby might have some input for us before we pitch the startup to VC's tomorrow evening.
Our goal is to build a platform which would integrate into an online game to provide more human-like AI by analysing gameplay data from actual human players and generating data to help AI's in their decision making logic. We would include both a system which determines what the most human-like action would be for a given scenario in the game (this is what we are prototyping this weekend) and an analytics system which records gameplay data from the games - this would be used for both the AI and also to provide the game designers with feedback on how the players play the games.
We've already spoken to a few developers (including the founders of Demonware) but would love some more ideas and feedback.
Basically, what I would like to know is
- do you or have you used middleware for AI and if so, which?
- what were/is your experience with AI middleware - did it leave a generally good impression?
- if you were building a multiplayer online game, would you be interested in middleware for AI?
We have also set up a landing page and facebook page, in case anyone is interested. If you like this project, I would love if you could "like" the facebook page, as it helps us during the team evaluations tomorrow. We also have a questionnaire that we would love people to fill out if anyone has a few minutes of time.
Website: prescienceai.com
Facebook page: www.facebook.com/PrescienceAi
Questionnaire: www.surveymonkey.com/s/823KXFK
Any and all feedback greatly appreciated!
- Dan.
