What are the best practices and tips for debugging game AI in real-time?

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Game AI is one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of mobile game development. It can make or break the player's experience, immersion, and satisfaction. However, testing and debugging game AI is not a straightforward task, especially when dealing with real-time scenarios, limited resources, and complex behaviors. In this article, we will explore some of the best practices and tips for debugging game AI in mobile games, and how to avoid common pitfalls and errors.

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Aleksandr Kolesnikov

Game QA Lead at Playkot | Bug Hunter | Game Tester | Elevating Game Quality and Experiences in Gamedev

1 Understand your AI goals

Before you start coding your game AI, you need to have a clear idea of what you want it to achieve, how it will interact with the game world, and what are the possible outcomes and challenges. You can use tools like flowcharts, state machines, or behavior trees to design and visualize your AI logic and structure. This will help you to identify potential problems, gaps, or inconsistencies in your AI design, and to plan your testing and debugging strategies accordingly.

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2 Use a debugger and breakpoints

One of the most essential tools for debugging game AI is a debugger, which allows you to inspect and modify the state of your game and your AI at any point during execution. You can use breakpoints to pause the game and examine the values of variables, expressions, or parameters that are relevant to your AI logic. You can also use breakpoints to trigger certain events, conditions, or actions that you want to test or debug. For example, you can use a breakpoint to force your AI to enter a specific state, or to change its behavior or parameters on the fly.

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Laksh Gandikota

Principal @ Slalom Consulting | Mobile Applications Expert
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Especially in iOS, instrumentation tools like Time Profiler and Signposts in Xcode can serve a similar role by helping developers monitor performance bottlenecks and track specific app states in real time. These tools allow you to dive deep into execution paths, just as breakpoints do for inspecting values, but with a focus on timing and system performance. Using Time Profiler, for example, we can spot slow functions and optimize them, which is invaluable for ensuring smooth AI behaviors in a mobile game setting!

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3 Add debug information and logs

Another useful tool for debugging game AI is to add debug information and logs to your game, which can display or record various data or messages related to your AI logic and performance. For example, you can use debug information to show the current state, goals, or actions of your AI agents, or to highlight their perception, navigation, or communication systems. You can also use logs to track the history, events, or errors of your AI agents, or to measure their performance, memory usage, or CPU time. Debug information and logs can help you to identify and fix bugs, optimize your AI code, or improve your AI design.

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Aleksandr Kolesnikov

Game QA Lead at Playkot | Bug Hunter | Game Tester | Elevating Game Quality and Experiences in Gamedev
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So, logs is a powerfool tool! It helps you to understend where there is a problem and of course helps your QA and testing teams create more useful bug-reports. In my practice logs were very useful in crash cases - server crash or client crash, especially in fast-paced games like shooters, moba, etc.

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4 Test your AI in different scenarios

One of the biggest challenges of debugging game AI is to test it in different scenarios, situations, and environments that can affect its behavior and outcome. You need to consider how your AI will react to various inputs, stimuli, or changes in the game world, such as player actions, events, physics, randomness, or difficulty levels. You also need to test your AI in different devices, platforms, or resolutions that can impact its performance and compatibility. You can use tools like simulators, emulators, or testers to create and run different test cases for your AI, or to automate your testing and debugging process.

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5 Get feedback and iterate

The final step of debugging game AI is to get feedback and iterate on your AI design and implementation. You can use various sources of feedback, such as your own observations, playtesting sessions, user reviews, analytics, or surveys, to evaluate how your AI performs, behaves, and affects the game experience. You can use feedback to identify and fix issues, bugs, or glitches in your AI, or to improve its quality, realism, or fun factor. You can also use feedback to generate new ideas, features, or improvements for your AI, or to refine your AI goals and expectations.

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What are the best practices and tips for debugging game AI in real-time?

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1 Understand your AI goals

2 Use a debugger and breakpoints

3 Add debug information and logs

4 Test your AI in different scenarios

5 Get feedback and iterate

Mobile Game Development

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