Useful for Everybody

Alex manages to do all this while keeping the book light and fun, which is a bit different from what one might find in other tomes. Instead of offering a series of, at best, loosely connected techniques with no obvious design interconnections, Alex focuses instead on trying to teach design skills and working techniques. The idea is to give the user a set of undoubtedly useful AI techniques, of course, but also to help provide him with the skill set to understand the theory behind the techniques and use them to better design his AI engine in the first place. Alex manages to pull this off without descending into the academic staleness that one often finds in similar books, which is frankly refreshing to somebody who has seen a lot of books cross his desk.

AI Game Development should be useful to just about anybody. Whether the reader is a hobbyist looking to build a new bot for the latest first-person shooter, a game developer who has some time between projects to pick up a few new techniques, or just a casual seeker of information to better understand the games he plays, this book will have something for you. The demos are fun to play with even if readers don't enjoy browsing through code, and the principles presented are done simply enough that players can at last bug their favorite developers on the forums to focus more on better game AI. (Trust me; we game AI developers need all the player support we can get!)

So sit back, pull up a laptop, and prepare to have some fun learning about game AI. This book talks about the future of game AI; it's worth paying attention.

Steven Woodcock
Founder of GameAI.com