Blogs for Orbital Arcade

I like to write about people, the places they live and the things with which they choose to surround themselves. Here are some of my favorite pieces that made it into Article.

True Grit: The 17th personality trait…

Adding Grit to the equation… It’s not that I didn’t think there were enough personality traits to work with already. I mean, there’s sixteen of them! However, the traits did not seem to adequately cover characters that can simply hang in there while going through hell, despite what you’d think of their personalities otherwise. It’s …

Knowledge Levels: Let your information run deep…

In the previous blog, I discussed the progress I had made with Interrogative 3, and realized that up to now, I had not discussed something that is core to how NPCs communicate with players (or, eventually, each other): Knowledge Levels. It’s important to understand what this is to see that Interrogative is not just some run-of-the-mill …

PAI – The case for Jekyll and Hyde

They, who are not what they seem… This week, I’m talking about personalities that are not what they seem, and Jekyll and Hyde is one of the best examples. A mild-mannered man (Dr Jekyll) drinks a potion that turns him into a sociopath known as Mr Hyde (read the plot here), and though they are …

Merry New Year!

Nothing much to report this week, except that a combination of the holidays and a cold means that I spent way more time on the couch than I should have. That, and I’ll be roaming the halls of GDC 2015 this year. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a good game development conference, …

PAI – Giving the characters some character

Data is Nice and all, but… Last time I talked about the data formats that were forming part of the core of Interrogative, and how that opened up a lot of ground for me in terms of bringing new features to bear. This time, let’s talk about our NPCs’ personalities…

Interrogative 3.0 – Just the facts, and maybe a bit more…

On Data… Previously, I talked about some very generic things regarding Interrogative 3 that I wanted to accomplish. Specifically, I wanted to make the dialog more procedurally generated, and to be able to access data that could be updated or “live”. With the previous versions of Interrogative, the problem was that most dialog that the …

Interrogative 3.0: Why the Conversation Focus?

NPCs have to talk… Some time has passed since I first wrote Interrogative 2.0, and I’ve learned some things since then. The first is that people might be interested in such a thing as a product. The second is that it’s capable of so much more than what I had originally made it do. Another …

Interrogative: The Need for Better Characters

A New Focus BablBrain represents a focus on AI, gameplay, and procedural content for online gaming. I’ll be doing a lot of blogging about the newest version of an AI technology I call Interrogative, as well as taking some tangents to talk about things like procedural content generation and some subjects to do with game mechanics. …