Book Review - Programming Game AI by Example

Rating: 5/5 📌
This is a great book, it provides real coding examples along with various design patterns for game AI. It also covers how to balance AI that appears smart, but not too smart that it'll prevent the user from progressing.
📌 Mat Buckland, the author has a way with words and makes it easy to understand what he is saying. This book even has a math review/primer at the start, making it a great book for game dev beginners.
📌 Finite State Machines are commonly used in game development, and you'll find them in examples in this book. Equipped with a message-passing system and steering behaviors you'll see how the two interact together to make agents move in your game world.
📌 Agent-based design reveals how to create "agents" in your game environment, showing you how they sense their environment and make decisions using their own AI logic.
📌 Graphs are extensively covered in this book and although it was a review from college, you'll cover Dijkstra, A*, and graph navigation. Essential tools to building your own nav mesh or traversing it effectively.
📌 Goal-Driven Agent Behaviors is my favorite design pattern pulled from this book. Essentially you learn how to structure a high-level goal using a hierarchy of smaller goals. For example, if an agent wants to "Buy Sword", then the goal will add all prerequisite goals, like"Get Gold" and "Go to Blacksmith", and those goals will do the same until all the smaller executable goals are completed.
📌 C++, this is a pro for me but may be a con for you. The book provides all examples in C++, which is great because C++ is my favorite language. The code is very readable but outdated and you may quickly find yourself in a quick C++ tutorial if you don't have much experience.
📌 I read this early in my game development career and it resonated with me very well. I recommend it to game developers of all kinds.

---