Special Announcement: Kythera AI

Today, we’re taking a little break from working on the V1032.1 patch for a special announcement.

It is no secret that bots in GROUND BRANCH are still very bare-bones and have a long way to go, which is why AI will be one of the main focuses of our upcoming major releases. As many players are aware, developing human-like tactical AI is, to say the least, extremely tricky even for large triple-A studios — let alone a small team like BlackFoot Studios — and capable AI developers willing to take on a niche project like ours are not easy to come by.

While game development can be an infinitely deep can of worms, it is made a little bit easier today by solutions such as Epic’s Unreal Engine and the ecosystem of plugins that support it. Enter Kythera AI: a middleware toolset that greatly enhances and facilitates AI development with features like their 2D navigation system (which includes formations, contextual pathfinding and character avoidance), automatic markup (to help generate cover and vaulting points, for example), spatial query system (which will help with combat maneuvering, among other things) and advanced behavior trees.

With that introduction, and as you have probably guessed by now, we are excited to announce that the Kythera AI toolset is now fully licensed for GROUND BRANCH! We very much look forward to resume AI development from V1033 onwards, as well as start giving players a more realistic and immersive PvE experience with Kythera’s partnership as we move forward. In John’s own words:

Great AI is crucial for us, and as a smaller studio without dedicated AI engineers, Kythera AI is the perfect solution. Their toolset easily integrates with our existing work in Unreal and lets us provide comprehensive, intelligent AI that we can maintain and continually improve. We can’t wait to roll out the first of these updates in the near future!

So there you have it, folks. Our AI has gone bare-bones for long enough, and as promised, we’re picking it back up very soon — with a leading industry solution to boot. While this will not mean state-of-the-art tangos and squad AI at the press of a button, we are confident that in addition to giving us the technical support we need, Kythera will offer a better foundation for our AI and generally make our lives much easier while developing it.

We’d like to thank Kythera AI for their partnership, and we can’t wait to start putting their tools to good use. To find out more about Kythera AI, check out their website here.