Behavior Design of Game Character's Agent

In human-level simulations, like video games can be, the design of character's behaviors has an important impact on simulation realism. We propose to divide it into a reasoning part, dedicated to a planner, and an individuality part, assigned to an action selection mechanism. Applying the separation of declarative and procedural aspects, the principle is to provide every character's agent with the same procedural mechanisms: the planner and the action selection mechanism. Declarative knowledge is then used at the agent level to individualize the behavior. The contribution of this paper consists in a motivation based action selection mechanism that allows individualization in behavior. The modularity provided by the motivations enables a large variety of behaviors for which the designer has to choose parameters. If the simulation of characters are our first motivation, the principles involved in the proposed motivation based action mechanism are general enough to be used in other contexts.