AI Characters and Directors for Interactive Computer Games

We are creating an environment for investigating the role of advanced AI in interactive, story-based computer games. This environment is based on the Unreal Tournament (UT) game engine and the Soar AI engine. Unreal provides a 3D virtual environment, while Soar provides a flexible architecture for developing complex AI characters. This paper describes our progress to date, starting with our game, Haunt 2, which is designed so that complex AI characters will be critical to the success (or failure) of the game. It addresses design issues with constructing a plot for an interactive storytelling environment, creating synthetic characters for that environment, and using a story director agent to tell the story with those characters.