Kythera AI demonstrates navigation across a huge world in Miscreated
The open-world sandbox game puts a creative twist on the popular zombie-survival genre with the multiplayer survival game pitting players against mutants, wild animals, and each other in a hostile post-nuclear landscape spanning an enormous open world.
With gameplay taking place across a 64 km² map, free of artificial boundaries or segmentation, performance was a key concern for Miscreated. “Since we started using Kythera, we’ve brought generation time down to 10 minutes for a navigation mesh across the whole area. That means we can let our NPCs out from their currently limited areas”, said Terry Evans, CEO of Entrada Interactive.
“The excellent runtime performance means we can also have many more mutants active. The result is we can fully populate our world and create a far richer experience for our players.”
- Terry Evans, CEO of Entrada Interactive
Kythera AI's ground-breaking dynamic navigation also helps with immersive world-building, allowing AI to respond to player actions - like destruction of environments and base-building - fully automatically, and with absolutely no pre-canned scripting.
“Miscreated is an exciting project for us, because we enjoy working on an epic scale,” said Matthew Jack, CEO of Kythera AI, “Entrada have created a beautiful sandbox world and built an enthusiastic player base. Through our middleware, we can deliver intriguing new experiences to their customers. With Kythera AI's focus on spontaneous, unscripted behaviors, we hope to deliver those ‘wow’ moments that players will be talking about for a long time to come.”
Indie studio Entrada Interactive's online, open-world sandbox game Miscreated was already in development when they decided to integrate Kythera AI middleware.
“The transition to Kythera was seamles. They took on the integration and migrated our existing behaviors, minimising disruption to our development team.”
- Terry Evans, CEO of Entrada Interactive.
The AI features that powered CryEngine Indie Game of the Year
Miscreated went on to be crowned CryEngine’s Indie Game of 2018 and Kythera's formidable set of AI features expanded as the game developed, in co-operation with Entrada's team.
The title pushed us to make developments to group behavior, such as packs of wolves that track and circle the player, calculating their confidence to attack or flee. The game also relies heavily on our dynamically generated navigation meshes, which continually update in response to world changes - from doors opening or vehicles moving, to players building their own complex bases.
"Using Kythera's toolkit, the Miscreated team were able to create an interesting and challenging variety of enemy behavior and other AI features," said Entrada Interactive’s CEO Terry Evans. "As an indie company we have limited resources, so we were glad that Kythera AI could help with custom integration and behavior building. Being voted Indie Game of the Year, it's great to know our players are really enjoying the results."
