Hello.
Now that I have your attention, you are hooked. You have no choice but to read my blog. Not that you really had anything better to do... You were probably just going to browse Reddit for a few hours anyway.
You've stumbled upon my little blog about artificial intelligence (AI) which is written by me, the "Dan Man." Totally my real name.
Not really my real name. That was a joke. It was pretty funny. My real name is Daniel Pumford, and I'm a third year computer science student at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I also happen to be a game programmer at a really cool video game company that my friends and I started called Emberware. We're working on getting our first game up on the Xbox Live Indie Games store, so... keep checking up on that. Shameless plug.
While working on the game (Dot Wars), I was looking around the internet for some good resources for learning about AI in video games. There was the occasional article about agent movement or dungeon pathfinding or something else cool, but I didn't notice a blog specific to basic AI programming. Such a blog would have been fairly helpful for me back three years ago when I was figuring out the basics of the craft.
So I started this blog to act as an aggregation for artificial intelligence tutorials and articles. Instead of having to look all over the internet to find interesting AI information, you (the reader), can just visit my blog instead! This can help new or experienced game programmers learn more about agent design in video games and at a faster pace. In addition to providing links and analysis of other writers' articles, I will also work to provide some good, quality articles of my own making. This can help me understand AI development a little better, while maybe helping you learn a little, too.
When writing about outside articles, I will either try to implement the content of the articles or analyse the methods for merit. Of course, I could do both or neither or something completely different, but you can be sure to expect something interesting to read. It may even be thoughtful, if I'm not too, well... bad at writing.
In addition to those articles, I'm really looking forward to writing a couple articles of my own! While working on Dot Wars at Emberware, I worked on both the underlying game engine as well as much of the agent behavior. I really, really liked working on them, and I developed a couple of my own methods for making decisions and pathfinding that I'd like to share with, well, you. It'll also be a good way for me to get some feedback on those ideas in a way that I usually wouldn't.
That's essentially what you can expect from this blog: some well-thought-out articles and analyses of artificial intelligence coding practices. As far as scheduling goes, starting next week you can check back every Friday for a brand new blog post. I'm going to first talk about this agent movement article that I mentioned earlier, so take a look at it before hand so you can, you know... actually learn something.
