Monday 3rd November 2025

About the talk
“Good Enough” AI: Pragmatic Approaches for Crafting Compelling Player Experiences in AAA Games, will cover the practicalities of building effective AI within the demands of large-scale game development. Drawing on my time as a Senior AI Programmer on Cyberpunk 2077’s vehicle AI, I’ll explain how we developed systems from scratch using Behavior Trees and implemented editor tools to support content creators. I’ll illustrate how these sensible strategies enabled a variety of engaging vehicle interactions across numerous quests and open-world scenarios, including the Delamain questline. The aim is to show that truly effective game AI often comes down to prioritizing player experience and efficient development over sheer algorithmic complexity.

Takeaway
– Empowering Content Creators Through Tooling
– Connecting AI to Creative Vision
– Lessons from the AAA Trenches
– Practical Strategies for Impactful AI in games

Experience level needed: Beginner, Intermediate

About the talk
Ambient characters breathe life into open world games, enhancing immersion and forging emotional connections with players through subtle environmental storytelling. Yet, the systems driving these characters often receive less attention than core gameplay mechanics like combat or stealth. This talk tackles the challenge of creating believable and engaging ambient character simulations without reinventing the wheel.
We’ll delve into a practical toolkit of proven, scalable, and maintainable techniques that prioritize performance and minimize production risks. Whether you’re approaching ambient character simulation for the first time, or an experienced developer seeking to broaden their knowledge and adopt industry best practices, this session provides effective solutions and actionable insights you can implement immediately.

Takeaway
– Learn to effectively advocate for strategic investment in living world AI by understanding its impact on player engagement, environmental storytelling, and overall business value.
– Know how to implement an ambient character simulation in a way that is scalable, maintainable and minimizes production risks through a collection of tried and tested techniques and best practices.
– Understand what problem each of the presented techniques is trying to solve, and how to critically evaluate when it makes sense for your game project.

Experience level needed: Beginner

About the talk
In this talk, we’ll explore how mobile developers can harness on-device ML for a variety of use cases. We’ll discuss practical approaches to running language models and other inference workloads locally to power features like dynamic dialogue, NPC behaviors, and adaptive systems. We’ll also show how neural graphics can enhance rendering and visual fidelity while reducing performance costs.

About the talk
Recast’s out-of-the-box navigation features are a good baseline and suitable for many games. However, most companies need to make significant modifications to make Recast’s navigation solution work for their game. While these modifications might work for one project, it might not be suitable for the next. In this talk we showcase how we built an extendable and reusable custom navigation stack that leverages Recast.We explore how to utilise Recast as part of a larger framework by breaking the generation process into individual plugins that form a tile generation pipeline. Each plugin lists the plugins it is dependent on, which forms an ordering. More importantly, this allows us to add additional plugin extensions leveraging the data that Recast produces.Using this framework, we show how it can be extended to implement features like hierarchical pathfinding, multimodal navigation (e.g. traversing multiple navigation meshes), and how to synchronise custom data. This naturally extends to custom extensions that automatically generate navigation links and cover locations.We showcase how this framework can combine multiple navigation meshes into a single system that constructs a unified navigation stack that works for all actor types. Furthermore, we show how it can encode additional constraints such as wading depth and affect pathfinding to avoid areas that are in line of sight of enemies.We showcase our framework in Unreal Engine and demonstrate that this custom navigation solution vastly outperforms Unreal in time, memory, and quality. 

Takeaway
– How to build a reusable navigation system;
– The benefits of building a custom navigation stack
– The merits of building a navigation system with extensibility as a first-class citizen

Experience level needed: Beginner