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Over the years, the biggest request we've had is for a full course... and now's the time! After months of setup and planning, our new course on Principles of Modern Game AI went live last month. It's a 12-unit online course that digs into the application of Artificial Intelligence to Games — focusing on core techniques, essential skills and principles transferable from one domain to another.
Already in the first week of its release we hit over 50k view for lessons and topics, as well as great feedback — which we appreciate tremendously! Anyway, if this is enough to spike your interest, head over to courses.nucl.ai and try out the first lessons! Enrollment is free until end of 2015 — after that it's included in the AiGameDev.com memberships.
Details and Target Audience
The course is aimed at technically-oriented developers with the Main track generally accessible to designers, testers and producers. The primary audience consists of Software Engineers though, and there is an Advanced track with programming exercises too. The units are about one hour and a half long and consist of several lessons that are released incrementally, combining short videos with exercises and optional coding.
Unit 0: Introduction
Here is a short summary of the first overview unit already released:
The Big Picture, the first lesson of this unit, includes examples of interactive agents with a short assignment, a brief history of game AI to set the scene, and an overview of the current state of the industry. Then we move onto the tricky subject of
Common Definitions in Game AI, giving an overview of how Artificial Intelligence relates, and what are the most important properties of Interactive Agents that make them different from other approaches.
In Production includes understanding the core philosophy behind the development of interactive agents in games, comparing interactive agents to other similar systems, and production methodologies often used by game studios.
Note: If you're interested in the full curriculum you can find it here
Questions & Special Thanks
There's an official nucl.ai sub-Reddit for all course specific questions. Feel free to ask, share and help out fellow developers! If you're enjoying the course already or if you have any feedback you can of course also find us on twitter @nuclai hashtag #pmgai.
For this course to be as comprehensive as possible we asked many experts for their advice; the amount of input we got back was overwhelming and their helpfulness really humbled us. A big thanks to all of them for having taken the time!
There are many studios out there looking for AI savvy developers of all levels. For our course we have teamed up with Creative Assembly, Ubisoft and IO Interactive who are a great starting point if you are looking for opportunities in the field!