Gamerzine – Darkspore: The AI Behind the Curtain

We felt one of the most important considerations when building an action-RPG was replayability. These are the kinds of games where you can play for countless hours even beyond completing the core campaign experience. The challenge we faced was making a return trip to a planet just as engaging as the first time through.

The idea of randomly generated levels is not uncommon for the genre, and it’s one of the solutions we considered early in development. However, the difference between turning right or left doesn’t really add much when encountering the same enemies on these planets. Thus, we attacked the problem of replayability from a slightly different angle, and that’s when our AI Director was born.

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