Embarrassing Mistakes: a short story about AI
summary
Uses behavior trees (Behavior3) to run up to ~800 agents making thousands of decisions per minute and producing gigabytes of debug data, which exposes concrete failures: camera control split between C++ and AI causes the view to stay disabled; merged player‑controller and AI lets NPCs ignore player orders; leftover child branch makes children ask for cigarettes; automatons enter inappropriate jobs. Builds in‑game visual error indicators, enforces three verifications—designer checklist, reproducible test cases, long‑run external playtests—and recommends separate player controller and limit AI to decision logic only.
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chapters (13)
- 0:00Embarrassing AI mistakes
- 1:04Serious games AI challenges
- 8:28Funny mistakes break immersion
- 11:41Camera control in behavior trees
- 15:18Player controller merged with AI
- 19:00Smoking children problem
- 21:31Frostpunk’s winter decisions
- 24:31Frostpunk controversy
- 25:59Automatons as prostitutes
- 28:50Debugging AI visually
- 33:12Adapting AI to new maps
- 35:21Key lessons from mistakes
- 37:31Q&A
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