Congrats to both Paul and Damian for recently shipping blockbuster titles garnering well deserved critical praise (Metroid and Halo respectively). Hopefully we will hear some juicy tidbits about their AI technologies here soon (especially from Damian who created this blog!)
As the deadline for IGF2008 passes, I have to confess that the next installment of The Restaurant Game will not be "shipping" quite yet. I still have work to do to automate conversational characters from the captured gameplay data, and would like to collect even more data in the mean time. I'm aiming for IGF2009, but I'll only promise to get it out before DNF. I've documented my progress so far at analyzing the data in the form of a Masters Thesis.
To date over 7,500 unique players have completed 6,762 games (including NPR Science Friday's Ira Flatow). Data is still trickling in, and we're inching our way to 10,000 games. Thank you to those who have played. Apologies for the delay -- I just don't want to serve anything that's undercooked. I owe you all a free dessert.
-Jeff
"When it's done" is a perfectly reasonable motto IMHO :-)
In the meantime, there's plenty of interesting stuff to read (that stuff is like candy for AI developers ;), so I wouldn't worry about it...
alexjc
Posted by: alexjc at October 2, 2007 02:01 AMYou know you're in for a good read when you read something like this on page 11:
Thesis reader.........Will Wright, Chief Game Designer, Maxis, Electronic Arts
... !
Congrats, Jeff, and I'm looking forward to reading it!
Posted by: Paul T at October 2, 2007 09:14 AMI have tough time opening the thesis pdf file, says something about damaged file...congrats on the NPR publicity btw.
Posted by: v at October 6, 2007 04:40 PMAt least it's actual work that you're doing rather than waiting for more playthroughs. Actual Work(TM) is always worth it.
Posted by: BiggerJ at October 6, 2007 10:27 PM