Agenda
Beyond Behavior Trees: Building A Group-First AI Architecture for 'Ghost of Yōtei'
Samuel Holley (Lead Gameplay Engineer and Designer, Sucker Punch Productions)
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Hot Topics:
AI
Track:
Programming, Design
Audience Level:
Intermediate
Format:
Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: Intermediate
For Ghost of Yōtei, Sucker Punch rebuilt its entire character AI architecture—a massive refactor of the engine they'd been evolving since the Infamous series. The reason was simple: the games had outgrown an architecture built around individual behavior trees. The Ghost games demanded group coordination for everything from cinematic battle choreography to the natural herd movement of wild horses. This strained the per-character behavior trees of the Infamous days, and the team found itself building more and more super-systems to make those independent brains work together.
For Yōtei, the team stopped treating coordination as a special case. Instead of giving every character its own brain and teaching them to collaborate, the new system controls all characters from a global group brain – a nesting data structure that breaks large coordination problems into progressively smaller ones. Groups, not individuals, become the foundational unit of AI.
This session explores how the system works, how it led to some of Ghost of Yōtei's signature gameplay experiences, and how changing architecture can change the way you think about design.
For Yōtei, the team stopped treating coordination as a special case. Instead of giving every character its own brain and teaching them to collaborate, the new system controls all characters from a global group brain – a nesting data structure that breaks large coordination problems into progressively smaller ones. Groups, not individuals, become the foundational unit of AI.
This session explores how the system works, how it led to some of Ghost of Yōtei's signature gameplay experiences, and how changing architecture can change the way you think about design.
Takeaway
Attendees will take away a new architectural framework for group-first character AI, and concrete techniques for coordinating large battles, companion combat, and other synchronized gameplay through hierarchical group behaviors.
Intended Audience
This session is for gameplay and AI programmers, technical designers, and technical directors interested in character AI architecture and coordinated gameplay. Familiarity with behavior trees or other character AI systems is helpful, but not required.