09,10 Dev119 News Q&A_final 28/07/2011 16:20 Page 2
ALPHA | NEWS Q&A
budget. With the one year licence, your investment of €6,000 will return to you in one man-month. Implementing and optimising a pathfinder from scratch takes far longer than one man-month. And the BrainPack 2011 offers you three products in one technology pack. What would you say to studios considering buying a BrainPack licence? Since we started this licence model at GDC in March, many game studios have signed up because of its cost and time saving benefits. The costs for the BrainPack are really a nobrainer and people love this offer. As we have customers for all game genres and game sizes – from indie studios to triple-A crossplatform productions – our customers can benefit from all the experience we have made in the past and what we spend in the improvements of our products. The BrainPack is a fast and easy thing; buy it and feel good.
xaitment customers can start with xaitMap (above) for pathfinding, and later in the project cycle add xaitControl to model the behaviours and game logic
world exchange a lot of tips and tricks in our forum and talk about their experiences. Also our support team handles the forum moderation and helps the community with a lot of input from the experts. As we have integrated our editors and runtimes into many game engines like Trinigy’s Vision Game Engine and vForge editor, Gamebryo’s Lightspeed Engine and Toolbench editor, or have interfaces ready to use for Unity 3D Pro, Unreal, etcetera. Integration of our runtimes into your game is only a matter of hours, not days or weeks. What distinguishes BrainPack 2011 from other AI tools bundles? Support. Our products are optimised for different platforms and you can book our world-class support team whenever you need help. As xaitment is a middleware company that has focused solely on AI for over seven years now, we have the senior experts that can assist your team. We can guarantee very fast response times to questions as well as feature requests at any time. If there is something missing in our products; no problem. Ask us and we can do it for you fast, with the highest quality, on time and we will maintain it for years. With xaitment, there is no risk that people are booked on other projects, get ill or are not accessible anymore – that leads to the question ‘who will maintain your AI?’. It’s also about premium partners. We are working very closely together with other middleware partners so that you benefit from an even bigger software package, where you can be sure that all runtimes are integrated and working well together. There are no hidden problems and time losses in your project. The seamless editor integrations into the level-editors of our partners are a big plus that makes it much easier to model a scene out of one editor. Your workflow does not change, you will get the same look and feel, and using our integrated products is easy to learn and intuitive to use.
10 | AUGUST 2011
It is easy and fast to integrate our runtimes into any existing game engine – whether commercial or internally developed. This can be done in hours. All our products consist of two parts; a runtime that you integrate once into your game and powerful editors to create and maintain your AI configurations without touching and re-compiling the code anymore. Last but not least the costs. It is one of the cheapest commercial AI bundles.
The big trend toward casual and social games raises the need to offer a licence to support smaller game budgets and faster development times. Dr Andreas Gerber, xaitment What challenges have defined the development of the BrainPack 2011? Due to the financial crisis and the massive loss of money in the past, publishers and game studios have told us that publishers and financiers are no longer willing to spend money in internal game engine development. They want to spend money for the gameplay, not for technology. They have learned that there are enough commercial and well supported engines on the market maintained by experts. So from a technical side as well as from a business side, the return of investment needs to get much faster. Also, the big trend toward casual and social games raises the need to offer a licence to support smaller game budgets and faster development times. Often game studios develop three to four games in parallel. So we decided to create a bundle to help our customers with the best technology on a low
Do you have any specific hopes for what BrainPack 2011 will achieve? Right now, the BrainPack is the right licence model in a time where money is hard to come by, development budgets are tight and development teams are getting smaller. We are seeing and expecting that our BrainPack 2011 will be a huge success by enabling small and big studios to be much more flexible and help them to focus more on the game design instead of having delays in the technical part of creating a game. Based on the quickly increasing number of new clients we have had since starting the BrainPack 2011, we have real evidence that the BrainPack cost and support structure is what people want. What kind of support will be available to BrainPack 2011 licencees? The BrainPack 2011 includes a standard support package, which we developed together with our customers. We asked them what they really needed. Therefore our customers get free updates and upgrades during the runtime of the licence and they have full access to our support knowledge base and our moderated support forum. We believe that out of the support cloud there will be tons of good ideas and tips and tricks generated. Last year we installed a moderated forum on our website and also started a fast, easy-to-use support system. Moderated means we help the community and we can discuss things in an open way with the community. Additionally, if more support is needed, we can offer dedicated support. Our experienced engineers are responsible for dealing with your questions now and in the future. This ensures that you will not have to tell us about a problem twice. The engineers know you and you will know them. Was there anything else you wanted to let us know about BrainPack 2011? As the BrainPack 2011 has proved to be a great success, it will be part of our core licences and it is not just a summer special. It will run over years so that you can count on it. In the future we plan to expand this licence model together with our partners.