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Video game development may jump to a new level thanks to the work of a University of British Columbia computer science graduate student.

Mike Vlad Cora's research looked at ways to make video games learn and adapt their behaviours, so as to create a more challenging and entertaining gaming experience for players.

He accomplished all this, while also laying the foundation of a system that would save video game creators months of production time.
Cora's research was done as part of Accelerate BC, an internship program that connects up-and-coming researchers in the province with BC companies for short-term, applied research projects.

Acclerate BC was established in February 2007 by MITACS, a research network based at Simon Fraser University, which seeks to link businesses across Canada with university expertise to solve key industry and societal challenges.

Cora's project was focused on helping Vancouver game developer Next Level Games apply artificial intelligence (AI) to the company's games.

Next Level Games is a third-party video game development house, providing software to various game publishers. Their customers include Activision and EA.

Cora developed the foundation of a system that would automatically learn to do things like selecting the best animation to play in response to certain player movements. Think of a hockey goalie responding to an approaching player with a different angle for each shot.

To achieve this effect, he took some advanced AI algorithms and experimented with ways of attaching them to existing game code so that they could automatically control a wide array of behavioural parameters.

This sort of work is usually done manually, often taking developers months of fine tuning to reach levels of realistic action that makes game play satisfying.

“This can be a very time consuming process,” said Cora. “So I tried to see how we can speed up this process by taking some of that manual work and make it automatic.”

Edoardo de Martin, Studio General Manager at Next Level Games believes the innovation will allow the company's creative people to spend more time focusing on the quality and experience of the game, rather than getting animations to queue up properly.

“We figure it could save up to six months production time. That's a huge time savings for us.”

But Cora also believes his research has wider implications, and one of his goals was to simplify the AI algorithms so they could be used in many other applications.

Still in a gaming context, he says “if the AI adapts to different players' styles then you'll always have a new experience when you play it, and much more variety in the game.”

Such benefits are not uncommon, although they are usually difficult to quantify.

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