An Integrated Development Model for Character-Based Games

Character-based games are strongly dependent on the quality of their Non Player Characters’ behavior. Developing games of this nature usually requires a high investment of time and money on Artificial Intelligence techniques, in order to provide better credibility to the characters. For the independent game developers’ community, affording this kind of extra complexity may be highly expensive. Therefore, this article proposes a way of developing character-based games while maintaining high quality and low-cost. This is done by using a modular Artificial Intelligence technique called Rule-Based Systems, integrated with a game development support tool, XNA. Since Java is better provided with Rule-based System tools, the IKVM application is used to allow this integration. All mechanisms and tools used are free. A comparison of free Rule-based Systems is presented, as well as an application of the proposed model on a real game project.