Showing: 1 - 10 of 22 RESULTS
Heat, MaxTac, and Blockades: Expanding the Police System in Cyberpunk 2077
About the talk
Take an insider look at the police chases in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty and dive into the dynamic spawning of road blockades and MaxTac AV encounters, which add flavor to regular police chases and are designed to keep players on the edge of their seats. Discover how the CD PROJEKT RED team leveraged Night City’s vast, vertical environment with graph-based lane discovery and asynchronous spawn points generation, ensuring seamless and engaging pursuits. With maximizing player’s fun in mind, this talk will also explore the unique technical challenges and solutions required to make these two features work.
Takeaway
Gain insights into the dynamic spawning of police chase add – ons, including road blockades and MaxTac AV encounters, as seen in Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty. Understand how to architect and implement these features effectively, balancing performance with immersive player experience.
Learn how to creatively leverage tools like:
– Asynchronous batch processing to handle complex logic efficiently without blocking the game thread.
– Graph – based traffic lane discovery for intelligent placement and movement within urban road networks.
– Physics – based overlap checks to validate spawn locations and ensure believable, non – intrusive placements.
Discover what makes a scalable and successful system for reactive world events in an open – world AAA game.
Experience level needed: Intermediate
From Metrics to Meaning: Effort-Aware and Explainable AI for Game Pathfinding
About the talk
This talk presents a practical, explainable framework that bridges the gap between raw AI pathfinding metrics and human-centered game design. Using Sokoban as a case study, we show how unsupervised clustering and visual analytics can decode difficulty, uncover hidden structural archetypes, and guide adaptive solver selection. Our results demonstrate how obstacle density, deadlock potential, and other features drive both algorithmic and human difficulty, enabling designers to make faster, more informed decisions about procedural content.
Takeaway
– How to translate opaque AI solver metrics into designer – relevant difficulty insights.
– Evidence – based design heuristics: why obstacle density and deadlock potential are critical levers in puzzle complexity.
– How clustering reveals hidden level archetypes and balances procedural content.
– Practical workflow for integrating explainable AI tools into game design pipelines.
– The value of adaptive solver selection for efficiency and player experience.
Experience level needed: Intermediate
AI Planning Analytics — From F.E.A.R (2005) to Assassin’s Creed: Shadows (2025)
About this Talk
Goal-Oriented Action Planning is 20 years old in 2025 since it was introduced in F.E.A.R in 2005. This 20th anniversary is the opportunity to visualize how planning works in a game when it is used as the decision procedure for NPC behaviors.
Takeaway
Answers to below questions:
– Why should we limit anything about the planner?
– Does the planner work more for some actions/goals than others?
– When heuristics are used, is a cheap action/goal/plan more frequent than others? Can the action/goal/plan cost influence its frequency?
– How many NPCs call the planner within a given time-frame?
– Is there a loss of control? Does planning take control of the game (instead of GD and LD) ? Could plans built by the planner be unexpected? Could surprises be planned?
– Does HTN Planning make any difference? o How Behaviour Analytics can be achieved?
No API. No Problem: Deploying tiny, fast, fine-tuned models offline.
About the talk
Game developers, especially those working on single-player or mobile titles, are often reluctant to integrate online APIs due to latency, cost, instability or platform constraints. Yet, the promise of generative AI remains strong, provided it can be fast, private, cheap, and seamlessly embedded into game experiences.
This talk explores a production-ready approach to deploying small, fine-tuned, dynamic language models inside games — without needing any internet connectivity. While many LLM-based use cases in games focus on low-hanging fruit like quest dialogue, we want users to take control of any text. We strive to bridge the gap between loose ideas or raw knowledge bases and structured data pipelines — the foundation for generating what we call Diamonds. Ultimately, you’ll understand how to generate reliable results with dramatically reduced memory usage and power consumption, even on the smallest of devices.
Takeaway
– Examine the operational and UX challenges of API – bound systems in videogames and how offline language models unlock new possibilities
– How is it that strategic templating governing input/output behaviours can be paired with strong alignment to your domain for reliable, adaptable outputs in a compact package
– Performance wins of embedded language models: tiny, fast, green and offline a. Side – by – side results comparing models across loading time, RAM use, etc.
– Lessons from building a toolchain for developers: what has and hasn’t worked
– What comes next: a peek into our ongoing R&D and Dynamic AI Platform features.
Experience level needed: Intermediate, Advanced
Design for everything in Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2
About the talk
We will explore the relation of design and iteration on the example of NPC perception in Kingdom Come: Deliverance and its sequel. How we made NPCs see in a realistic, open world RPG, what we thought is going to work and what we actually had to do to make it work. What it takes to tune a system to behave in both scripted and emergent situations, to provide enjoyable but nontrivial gameplay and enhance immersion. All that under 3 ms per frame. We will be reminded of lessons that might seem basic but still could pose a challenge over 10+ years of development.
Takeaway
– Designing for everything is doomed to fail; why?
– Iteration takes long but can lead to success
– The importance of stable teams
– The importance of selling features to the player
Experience level needed: Intermediate
Bringing Research to Life in AAA Game Production
About this Talk
In this talk, I will share what it is like to work as a research scientist in a major AAA game company, supporting multiple studios with cutting-edge AI and tools. Game development is a fast-paced, high-stakes environment, naturally risk-averse, so our role in the applied R&D development is to build practical, proof-of-concept ideas that solve real production problems.I will walk through the full lifecycle of a successful research project, from identifying pain points with game developers and designers, through literature review and prototype development, to working closely with teams to deliver usable tools. I will present our approach to research integration and I will share examples from projects we have worked on, including internal tools and experiments from franchises like Plants vs. Zombies and Battlefield. I will also reflect on the unique challenges of transitioning from academic research to the game industry — and why I believe research is fundamental to the future of game development.
Takeaway
– How to successfully start and finish a research project within a game company. The framework can be used by any research team within a game company, small or large.
– Lessons learned and mistakes not to be repeated in a research project. We will see practical examples of real research projects shipped into games.
– Understand why research is important for the next generation of games and how a research team can deliver value to game studios.
How to Build a Friend: AI Companionship and Its Game Design Potential
About the talk
I’m not a game designer; I am an AI Product Manager with a psychology background who recently transitioned into the gaming industry. But I’ve spent the past several years building the AI companions Replika and Blush, which millions of people talk to every day. I’ve seen firsthand how and why people form emotional bonds with AI. In this talk, I’ll explore what the phenomenon of AI companionship can teach us about designing richer, more immersive experiences in games.
We’ll look at how advances in generative AI might enable NPCs to become interactive companions. This talk will analyze the design/UX strategies and psychological principles that make AI “friends” engaging. We will explore why people want to talk to an AI and form these connections. We’ll also dive into the ethical and safety implications of AI companions, from safeguarding users (especially younger players) against harm to preventing emotional over-dependence, and discuss best practices for responsible implementation. Hopefully, by the end of this talk, the audience will gain a nuanced understanding of AI companionship that goes beyond simplistic narratives of benefit or harm.
Takeaway
– Learn from real – world successes and failures.The audience will see what actually works and what doesn’t when creating AI characters based on lessons from AI companions. We’ll explore strategies for creating believable AI characters and learn why defining an AI’s personality and boundaries – before – you start is critical.
– Understand the psychology of player attachment. This talk will explore – why – players get attached to AI, helping to understand the human needs these companions meet like combating loneliness or practicing social skills.
– Start thinking about building AI companion experiences ethically and safely. Audience will get an idea of the real emotional implications for players and responsible design in the realm of AI Companions.
Experience level needed: Beginner