Study-Unit Description

Study-Unit Description


CODE ICS3209

 
TITLE Advanced Game AI

 
UM LEVEL 03 - Years 2, 3, 4 in Modular Undergraduate Course

 
MQF LEVEL 6

 
ECTS CREDITS 5

 
DEPARTMENT Artificial Intelligence

 
DESCRIPTION The Advanced Game AI (AGAI) is aimed at giving students a comprehensive overview towards AI game creation. It will focus mainly on the theoretical part and it will try to identify the elements of a good game, the identification of a good theme, ensure a good user experience etc always within the context of the AI. We will also have a look at the major gaming platforms such as (the iPhone, the XBOX 360, etc). Finally we will help students apply what they learnt in Foundations of Game AI. We will apply advanced techniques such as complex decision making, learning, etc.

Study-unit Aims:

- Introduction to designing a good game taking into considerations things such as social interaction, etc;
- Give an overview of the whole process and understand how it works;
- Make use of a real game development tools such as Unity 3D etc in order to integrate the advanced Artificial Intelligence techniques covered during the study-unit.

Learning Outcomes:

1. Knowledge & Understanding:

By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to:

- Describe how to design a good game;
- Apply such a technology to other application areas such as gamification of real life scenarios;
- Explain the implications and trade-offs of constructing a complex AI system for games;
- Explain how to implement advanced AI techniques in games.

2. Skills:

By the end of the study-unit the student will be able to:

- Transfer the newly acquired knowledge to other situations such as in gamification of real life systems;
- Give practical examples of how advanced AI techniques can be used in game development;
- Design a good game which can be implemented on different platforms.

Main Text/s and any supplementary readings:

- J Schell, The Art of Game Design: A book of lenses (2008), Morgan Kaufmann, ISBN 0123694965.
- R Koster, A Theory of Fun for Game Design (2004), Paraglyph Press, ISBN 1932111972.
- A Reed, Learning XNA 4.0: Game Development for the PC, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 7 (2010), O'Reilly Media, ISBN 1449394620.
- P Zirkle and J Hogue, iPhone Game Development: Developing 2D & 3D games in Objective-C (2009), O'Reilly Media, ISBN 0596159854.
- V Silva, Pro Android Games (2009), Apress, ISBN 1430226471, Packt Publishing, ISBN 1849690545.
- R Creighton, Unity 3D Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide (2010)
- M Buckland, Programming Game AI by Example (2004), Jones & Bartlett Publishers, ISBN 1556220782.

Various online resources.

 
RULES/CONDITIONS Before TAKING THIS UNIT YOU MUST TAKE ICS2211

 
STUDY-UNIT TYPE Lecture and Independent Study

 
METHOD OF ASSESSMENT
Assessment Component/s Assessment Due Sept. Asst Session Weighting
Project SEM1 Yes 100%

 
LECTURER/S Andrew Emanuel Attard
Alexiei Dingli (Co-ord.)
Benjamin Joseph Spiteri

 

 
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It should be noted that all the information in the description above applies to study-units available during the academic year 2023/4. It may be subject to change in subsequent years.

https://www.um.edu.mt/course/studyunit