Learn to make games that are more fun and engaging! Building on fundamental principles of Artificial Intelligence, Funge explains how to create Non-Player Characters (NPCs) with progressively more sophisticated capabilities. Starting with the basic capability of acting in the game world, the book explains how to develop NPCs who can perceive, remember what they perceive, and then continue in the game play to think about the effects of possible actions, and finally learn from their experience. Funge considers the system architecture and explains how to implement potential behaviors (both reactive and deliberate) for intelligent and responsive NPCs allowing for games that are more fun and engaging. Emphasizing enduring design principles, Funge covers the basics of Game AI and provides a clear, easy to read introduction that beginning programmers and game designers will enjoy.

John Funge is a co-founder and leading scientist at a new Silicon Valley based company focusing on AI effects for computer entertainment. John previously worked at Sony Computer Entertainment America's (SCEA) research lab. Before that John was a member of Intel's Microcomputer Research Lab (MRL). He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics from King's College London in 1990, an M.Sc. in Computer Science from Oxford University in 1991, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1998. John is the author of numerous technical papers and his first book "AI for Games and Animation: A Cognirive Modeling Approach" is one of the first to take a serious look at AI techniques in the context of computer games and animation. His current research interests include computer games, machine learning, knowledge representation, and new democratic methods.