One of the biggest AI-driven titles of modern times, Alien: Isolation brings the

terror of the xenomorph to video games. While the alien, LV-426 and many other key
elements of the franchise have previously been explored, Alien: Isolation takes a
different route. A horror game steeped in the aesthetic and style of Ridley Scott’s
classic 1979 movie: in which the player is trapped on the Sevastopol space station
with a single, intelligent, near-invincible alien. For this experience to play out
as expected, the alien itself has to carry a large amount of the experience: a
demanding feat for any AI in an industry in which non-player characters are either
heavily scripted or suffer really short life spans.

So how did developers Creative Assembly pull it off? The short answer is through
tried and tested AI techniques, designed in a manner that breaks from many
traditional game-design concepts.

The Design of the Xenomorph

The team behind Alien: Isolation built the game around a simple premise: to survive
an encounter with Ridley Scott’s original alien. Such a feat is pretty difficult to
balance, given that you need a strong story to carry the player through, but also
to establish pacing such that the tension varies throughout your gameplay. Neither
of these are easy when you introduce a systemic AI into play: a collection of
decision-making systems that react to what is happening in the game. It needs to
know when it can participate in the experience and it what level it should do so.
In order to do this, it required a unique design perspective.

Related:Game Design Deep Dive: The save system of Alien: Isolation

‘Psychopathic serendipity’: the alien always find itself in the right place at
the right time.

As explained by Andy Bray in his talk at the 2016 [Link] conference, the player
can’t be scared senseless all the time, otherwise they’ll just give up. The tension
had to vary but also maintain an air of unpredictability in the xenomorph itself.
This led to the developers seeking inspiration naturally from horror movies such as
Ridley Scott’s Alien, but also adventure movies such as Jurassic Park. The
resulting philosophy: ‘psychopathic serendipity’ is where the alien always find
itself in the right place at the right time. Even if you’re in hiding and the
monster can’t see you, and it doesn’t know your ultimate objective, it will still
find a way to mess with your plans. However, the key to pulling this off was to
ensure it wasn’t scripted. Co-ordinated jump scares while fruitful the first time
are cheap; they won’t yield further reward in subsequent playthroughs. Instead, the
player should have a sense of powerlessness, but still know that while the alien is
smart, they are smarter.

Related:Fear in unpredictability: Alien: Isolation's brand of survival horror

But all of this goes against the grain of a lot of AAA games development: a world
in which player empowerment is key. This means challenging a lot of design tenets
that have held in pretty much every Alien game — from Alien 3 and Alien: Trilogy to
Aliens: Colonial Marines. The biggest departure is that you cannot kill the alien.
You can distract it and in time find ways to hurt it and scare it off, but you
can’t kill it. But in another significant departure, a role reversal between
antagonist and player: the alien will not only kill you frequently, but it does so
with one hit.

Building the Alien AI System

In order for this alien to work, Creative Assembly fell back on reliable and
trusted AI techniques. Building systems that ensure the alien serves its purpose,
but interestingly, also ensures it plays according to expectations.

To achieve this, the game requires two distinct behaviour management systems: the
‘macro’ or director-AI and the ‘micro’ or alien-AI. The director observes the
player throughout the game, always knowing your location. Meanwhile the alien-AI is
driven by a series of sensors and behaviours that allow it to hunt the player down.
The director’s job is to point the alien in the direction of the player
periodically, to give it a hint as to where it should be looking. Despite this, the
alien is never allowed to cheat: while the director always knows where you are, the
alien has to figure it out for itself. You can fool it, you can surprise it and you
can escape it.

Related:Revisiting the AI of Alien: Isolation

The Director

The director is responsible for managing what is known as the ‘menace gauge’: a
metric that allowed the system to understand how much it was pressuring the player.
This is rather similar to an approach made in Left 4 Dead in which a stress gauge
was used to prioritise enemy attacks. However in this case, menace would come not
from attacking the player, but being in their proximity and the perceived increase
in tension.

As such, the system would periodically wish to invoke menace upon the player and
tell the alien to head to a particular location. While the alien is near the
player, the menace gauge would increase depending on specific factors:

Whether the creature is within a short walking distance of the player.

Whether the player has actual line of sight on the alien.

Whether the alien was close on the motion tracker, but could also reach the
player quickly.

The last item is particularly important, as the alien could technically be close on
the motion tracker but in another room. As such, the menace won’t increase at the
same rate given the threat is minimal.

‘Menace’ comes not from attacking the player, but being in their proximity and
the perceived increase in tension.

Naturally once this menace metric has peak level, the director backs off and sends
the alien elsewhere: either into neighbouring areas or up into the air vents. The
general principle being that when the alien is closer, the game is scarier, but we
need to give players a break after a while. Not only to ensure they stop freaking
out, but to enable them to achieve some progress in the game.

This whole process is managed via a Utility AI or job system — previously used in
the likes of BioShock: Infinite for the companion character Elizabeth — which
dictates the task to complete, the location the alien should visit and the priority
with which it should do so. The priority dictates to the alien whether it should
finish what it is doing now, immediately move towards doing this action (and blend
the required animations) or just outright interrupt everything and execute right
now!

The job system allows the alien to operate in two main states of active and
passive. The active state or 'front stage' mode, is when the alien is told to sweep
areas of the map or search specific locations after a certain noise or trigger
occurred. Meanwhile the passive or backstage mode occurs once menace levels peak
for too long and it falls back into the air vents. But of course, it would then
head for air vents up ahead it thinks you’re going to move towards.
The Alien Itself

The aliens behaviour is reliant upon behaviour trees: a technique we’ve previously
highlighted in our video on the AI of Halo. The monster has over 100 nodes hidden
within its behaviour tree system, with the top level of around 30 nodes responsible
for selecting what type of behaviour it was about to execute. These top level nodes
would then have the alien execute within large sub-sections of the tree responsible
for specific sub-behaviours relating to specific tasks.

To add to this, certain parts of the behaviour tree are — on starting the game —
locked off. The system gradually unlocks these behaviours in the tree as certain
conditions are met throughout the game. This ensures that the longer you play, that
the alien starts to exhibit new traits that keep you on edge. In a sense, it gives
the impression that the alien is beginning to learn from experience, given the
players behaviour is triggering the conditions that unlock it. Though as Andy Bray
was keen to point out: none of these conditions come from events that lead to a
players death. Otherwise the AI may develop an unfair advantage: given you might
never figure out what you're doing wrong that is resulting in a gain for the alien.
One concession however, is there are triggers in the final build of the game that
unlock behaviours at specific points in your campaign if they haven’t already, that
way the creature can keep pace with the player as they get better at the game.

When given a specific job to complete from the director, the alien is reliant upon
a fast and efficient pathfinding system, with heuristics based on particular
sensors the alien has. The alien can 'sense' player footsteps when walking or
running, gunshots, and even the motion tracker when the player is around 1.5 meters
away. Lastly, while it does not have sensors in the tail, it does have short-range
ray traces that look behind it - eyes in the back of its head - with the intention
of ensuring that players do not avoid detection by walking closely behind it.

[The alien] literally has eyes in the back of its head… ensuring that players
do not avoid detection by walking behind it.

Finally, we consider the aliens movement patterns: those who have played Alien:
Isolation will know that the alien is prone to pacing around an environment for
several minutes. This thing isn’t moving towards a specific location in an optimal
fashion; it’s searching, it’s hunting. This is achieved by giving the alien
particular areas of interest to explore— either hand-tuned by designers or
generated dynamically in the environment. Sometimes these are specific locations
the designers want the alien to visit, and other times it’s responding to players
given they have made too much noise. A perimeter of nearby locations is established
and the alien will devise a path to visit them all in a sub-optimal fashion —
meaning it will visit every point, but not with any guarantee it does so in the
shortest sequence. These positions are prioritised based on their visibility by the
alien and results periodically in the creature backtracking on itself: a behaviour
designed on purpose to give the illusion it’s double-checking or doubting itself.
Locations for alien movement are separated into search locations: those that the
alien will visit, and spot locations: where it will stay where it is currently
standing and then turn to look at the area of interest. For safety, the designers
were able to dictate specific areas the alien never looks, ensuring it doesn’t
catch you out in unfair situations.

Considering all this design effort, you’d be quick to think that despite it all,
the game designers would still allow for the alien AI to cheat periodically by
either teleporting or being clairvoyant in its knowledge. According to Bray, this
is categorically untrue. Throughout the entire 12–18 hour campaign, the alien only
teleports twice to be in very specific locations and is only done to enable it
appear in cutscenes.

Closing

Alien: Isolation is an achievement: an AI-driven game that holds your attention for
the most part through the experience of interacting a primary antagonist. A real
feat in and of itself, the fact that this is then achieved within the context of a
horror game is all the more impressive. Fortunately this was largely agreed upon by
critics, who hailed the alien and it’s AI behaviour as a real driving force behind
the game. This is the summation of intelligent design principles being applied to
tried and trusted AI techniques. The illusion of an intelligent and ferocious
creature can be managed on multiple levels of complexity. Provided that illusion
holds true, then the resulting product will prove memorable for players.

This piece is adapted from the video posted on my patreon-funded YouTube Channel
‘AI and Games’. My thanks not only to my Patreon supporters, but also to Andy Bray
of Creative Assembly who was kind enough to answer some questions about the game.