Jorge Palacios - Unity 2018 Artificial Intelligence Cookbook - Second Edition

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First published: March 2016
Second edition: August 2018

Production reference: 1240818

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ISBN 978-1-78862-617-0

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Jorge Palacios is a software and game developer with a BS in computer science and eight years of professional experience. He's been developing games for the last five years in different roles, from tool developer to lead programmer. Mainly focused on artificial intelligence and gameplay programming, he is currently working with Unity and HTML5. He's also a game-programming instructor, speaker, and game-jam organizer.

Dr. Davide Aversa holds a PhD in artificial intelligence and an MSc in artificial intelligence and robotics from the University of Rome, "La Sapienza," in Italy. He has a strong interest in artificial intelligence for the development of interactive virtual agents and Procedural Content Generation (PCG). He serves as a peer reviewer in video game-related conferences, such as the IEEE conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) and he also regularly participates in game-jam contests.

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When we think about artificial intelligence (AI), a lot of topics may come to mind, from simple behaviors such as following or escaping from the player, through the classic chess-rival AI, to state-of-the-art techniques in machine learning or procedural content generation.

Talking about Unity means talking about game development democratization. Thanks to its ease of use, fast-paced technological improvements, ever-growing community of developers, and new cloud services, Unity has become one of the most important pieces of game industry software.

With all that in mind, the main goal of writing this book is to offer you, the reader, both technical insight into Unity, following best practices and conventions, and theoretical knowledge that helps you grasp AI concepts and techniques, so you can get the best of both worlds for your own personal and professional development.

This cookbook will introduce you to the tools you need to build great AI, either for creating better enemies, polishing that final boss, or even building your own customized AI engine. It aims to be your one-stop reference for developing AI techniques in Unity.

Welcome to an exciting journey that combines a variety of things that means a lot to me as a professional and human being; programming, game development, AI, and sharing knowledge with other developers. I cannot stress how humbled and happy I am to be read by you right now, and grateful to the team at Packt for this formidable opportunity. I hope this material helps you not only take your Unity and AI skills to new levels, but also deliver that feature that will engage players with your game.