The Beginner's Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Unity

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Do your non-player characters lack drive and ambition? Are they slow, stupid and constantly banging their heads against the wall? Then the Udemy course “The Beginner’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Unity” is for you. Join Penny as she explains, demonstrates and assists you to create your very own NPCs in Unity with C#. In this course, Penny reveals the most popular AI techniques used for creating believable character behavior in games using her internationally acclaimed teaching style and knowledge from over 25 years working with games, graphics and having written two award-winning books on games AI. Through-out you will follow along with hands-on workshops designed to teach you about the fundamental AI techniques used in today’s games. You’ll join in as NPCs are programmed to chase, patrol, shoot, race, crowd and much more.

At the completion of this course, you will have gained a broad understanding of what AI is in games, how it works and how you can use it in your own projects. It will equip you with a toolset to examine any of the techniques presented in more depth to take your game environments to the next level.

The Beginner’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Unity – Course Content

This course is a practical guide to programming non-player characters for games. It begins with a detailed examination of vector mathematics that sits at the very heart of programming the movement of NPCs. Following this system of waypoints will be used to move characters around in an environment before examining the Unity waypoint system for car racing with AI controlled cars. This leads to an investigation of graph theory and the A* algorithm before we apply these principles to developing navmeshes and developing NPCs who can find their way around a game environment. Before an aquarium is programmed complete with autonomous schooling fish, crowds of people will be examined from the recreation of sidewalk traffic to groups of people fleeing from danger. Having examined the different ways to move NPCs around in a game environment their thinking abilities will be discussed with full explanations and more hands-on workshops in finite state machines and behavior trees.

The follow-along workshops included in the course come with starter Unity asset files and projects complete with solutions. Throughout there are also quizzes and challenge exercises to reinforce your learning and to guide you to express your new found knowledge. The Course comprises 51 Lectures organized into the following sections:

Introduction
Moving
Cars
Waypoints
NavMeshes
Moving As One
Let’s Start Thinking
Behaviour Trees

Requirements

You should be familiar with C# and the Unity Game Development Engine.

Summary of Course Main Features

Instructor: Penny de Byl, Professor of Computer Science, Games and Procedural Art
Lectures: 51
On-demand video: 8 hours
Articles: 10
Supplemental Resources: 39
Includes:
- 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee
- Full lifetime access
- Access on mobile and TV
- Certificate of Completion