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.