Designing Stronger AI Personalities

Abstract

In this invited industry case study, Tanya X.Short introduces eight mechanisms that designers can utilize to better harness procedural character personalities in games. Tanya is co-founder and captain of Kitfox Games, a Montreal-based independent game studio, and a veteran developer and designer known for her expertise in procedural generation and systems-driven game design. With Tarn Adams, she edited the 2017 volume Procedural Generation in Game Design. As Tanya explains in this paper, there is an emerging pattern in game design that utilizes character personality as a central gameplay system. Using a number of examples spanning her experiences as both developer and player, in this paper Tanya distills her collected design knowledgeinto an actionable recipe for building better character personality systems.