The Beginner's Guide to Artificial Intelligence in Unity

A practical guide to programming non-player characters for games

Learn

Design and program NPCs with C# in Unity
Understand how AI is applied in computer games
Implement AI-related Unity Asset plugins into existing projects
Work with a variety of AI techniques for developing navigation and decision-making abilities in NPCs

About

This course takes you through the most popular AI techniques used for creating believable character behavior in contemporary games. With the help of practical workshops, you’ll learn how non-player characters (NPCs) are programmed to chase, patrol, shoot, race, crowd, and do much more.

The course begins by delving into vector mathematics, which lies at the heart of programming the movement of NPCs. It will introduce you to the system of waypoints for moving characters around in an environment and show you how to implement the Unity waypoint system for racing with AI-controlled cars. You’ll study the graph theory and the A* algorithm and apply them to develop navmeshes as well as NPCs that can find their way around a game environment.  You’ll study the movement of groups of people fleeing from danger to program an aquarium with autonomous schooling fish. Once you’ve examined the different ways to move NPCs around in your game environment, you’ll learn about their thinking abilities and get hands-on with more workshops using finite state machines and behavior trees.

The follow-along workshops included in this course come with starter Unity asset files and projects complete with solutions. You will be able to reinforce your learning by solving quizzes and challenging exercises.

By the end of this course, you’ll have developed a broad understanding of AI in games, how it works, and how you can use it in your projects. You’ll be equipped with a toolset to explore all of the techniques presented in the course in-depth to take your game environments to the next level.

You may find an older version of Unity, which is Unity 2017 and Unity 2018 present a few times in the video, but don't worry about it. Unity's releases are mostly backward compatible, so there's not much breakage of code and will work fine in the current versions as well.

Features

Learn how to develop AI mechanics for games with vectors, waypoints, navigation meshes, and the A algorithm
Get to grips with crowd simulations and flocking
Explore finite state machines for animated characters and automatic driving vehicles