GDC 2025 Session Viewer
Game AI Summit: Designing Emotions in 'Star Wars Outlaws' Gamblers NPC
Jean-Baptiste Siraudin (Game Designer, Ubisoft)
Pass Type: All Access Pass, Summits Pass - Get your pass now!
Track: Programming
Format: Lecture
Vault Recording: TBD
Audience Level: All
When designing the card mini-game Kessel Sabacc for Star Wars Outlaws, one of the biggest challenges was to translate the fun of playing cards on a lively table to a PvE environment. Beyond making a ruleset fun and accessible, the high ambitions in immersion required the NPCs to express their frustration or their joy, just like any other gambler would do. This session explores how emotional behaviors were built for the Sabacc players NPC and the Canto Fathier Racing spectators NPC, two mini-games of Star Wars Outlaws. Inspired by classic human-computer interaction literature on emotional agents, the approach relies on the OCC model to better categorize and design a list of emotion assets, and a simplified Belief-Desire-Intention state machine to handle the logic of each emotional behavior.
Takeaway
Attendees will learn how to design systemic emotional behaviors in order to create believable and playful NPCs to interact with. The talk will focus on the theoretical approach that can be applied anywhere, as well as key insights and challenges for its implementation in the Sabacc and Canto Fathier Racing minigames.
Intended Audience
This talk is aimed at designers or programmers working on AI topics of all kinds, as well as for anyone interested in studying emotions through the lens of human-computer interaction. No prerequisite knowledge is required.