makingmusic476 on 28 October 2008
I'm glad the AI seems to be improving. GG seems to be stealing a page out of Bungie's playbook: Playtest often.
To go into further detail about this, earlier this year Alex Champanard of AIGameDev.com announced that he had been contracted by Sony and Guerrilla Games to work on Killzone 2's AI:
http://aigamedev.com/site/2008-plan-killzone
Back in 2007, Champanard wrote a very in-depth article discussing Bungie's methods of AI development. It's a really interesting article, and everybody should read it:
http://aigamedev.com/reviews/halo-ai
One of the interesting points discussed in the article was this:
10) Playtest as Much as You Can
The Halo franchise has used focus testing right from the start. The idea is to get 25-35 non-hardcore players who’ve never seen the game, let them play and fill in a survey about their experience. So the strategy is quite simple:
“Playtest early, playtest often!”
The results from the tests are both objective and accurate, which helps with design and level structure greatly. Bungie even has designers watch the playtesting, to give them the motivation to build a game that people want to play without getting frustrated!
The Halo franchise has used focus testing right from the start. The idea is to get 25-35 non-hardcore players who’ve never seen the game, let them play and fill in a survey about their experience. So the strategy is quite simple:
“Playtest early, playtest often!”
The results from the tests are both objective and accurate, which helps with design and level structure greatly. Bungie even has designers watch the playtesting, to give them the motivation to build a game that people want to play without getting frustrated!
As best I can tell, most developers don't do this. They normally go the Insomniac route, and just do internal testing, hire some testers, and playtest with developers from other teams within Sony.
Apparently, Guerrilla started doing this weeks ago. Very soon, they'll be holding yet another public playtest at their studio in Amsterdam:
http://www.killzone.com/kz/_ns:YVByb3h5LTF8YzB8ZDB8ZXByb3h5VGFyZ2V0PTE9TDNOalpXVXZZbTloY21RdmJXVnpjMkZuWlQ5aWIyRnlaQzVwWkQwNUpuUm9jbVZoWkM1cFpEMHlNelE1TUE9PT09/forums.psml
During these playtests, players get to play through the entire campaign. There have already been details about the singleplayer leaked on GameTrailers as a result, details that later made their way to neogaf, resulting in Tempy, a GG developer, inadvertently confirming the details when he tried to find out the original poster's information because of the NDA violation:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=13396731&postcount=495
