Conferences, Camera Tests, & More
Goal State - Backer Update: March 2025
In December of 2024, the first Kickstarter campaign for Goal State was 154% funded. Every month I will be providing updates on the ongoing work to complete the project, and deliver the end reward of complete video lecture and tutorial series on the foundations of AI for game development. While the original 30-day campaign has since closed, you can still sign up for late pledges via the Kickstarter page.
Hello all, and welcome to our March update. It’s not the most exciting of updates, given there is not a lot to show at this current point in time. But, we still have a couple of news items to share, and hopefully you’ll be excited about them. Onward!
GDC Slowdown
March was always going to be the slow month for Goal State, given I lose at least about two weeks to GDC, given we have not only a bunch of prep before I leave, but also a bunch of follow-ups that I am still doing this week. On the plus side, my time at the event was rather positive, and I’m hoping we can make something of it across our various arms of what I’m doing at
- be it content creation, consultancy and training, and our 2025 conference. More news on that as it comes via the weekly newsletter as and when it is ready to be shared.
But this was always to be expected, and critically we had it in the production schedule as being a blocker for a lot of what we’re doing. That said, I’m a little farther behind in production than I would have liked. But this month is very much about moving other things out of my way to let me get on with it uninterrupted!
Quick Reminders
Some quick reminders of other things happening in and around Goal State.
Backer Survey is Still Live
The backer survey is still live, with around 40 backers still not having completed it. This is fine, we’ll keep it going for now. But a reminder to check your inboxes for a survey email sent out on January 27th.
Join The Discord Area
I’ve not had a lot to say in the Discord area this past month, given we don’t have much to share just yet. But it will become busier over time. To join, make sure you’re both a member of the
Discord server (LINK), and have completed the Backer Survey.Production Shifts
As mentioned last month, Shraddha has came on board as all-round production assistant and while that added work for me to-do in the short-term, it’s beginning to free up my time some more. Critically we have it on the agenda that April and May is really about squeezing more time out of the workload to get more focussed on both writing and recording more of Goal State as we progress.
We always knew March was a tough month, and having Shraddha join was stressful in that it added more work during a busy month. But, as I say, it’s beginning to pay dividends.
Writing Update
Despite the delays brought on by GDC, I still managed to smash out about another 6,500 words of the ‘book’ of the course, bringing it to just over 19,000 words in length. It became a lot easier once we moved out of chapters 0 through 2, and into the other chapters where now the reader hopefully is familiar with a lot of the terminology we’re going to be using in this course going forward.
Right now, Chapter 0 (the introduction) and Chapter 1 (Foundations of AI) are largely complete, with Chapter 2, 3, & 4 in some stage of mid-completion. Last month my plan was to get an internal draft ready of all of these chapters and I failed to do that. Admittedly, my targets were a little too aspirational, given the GDC slowdown. I had even foolishly hoped I could write some of the course while I was at GDC! I did managed to write maybe 800 words one morning as I was horribly jetlagged and sitting in
Video Update
So we’ve previously said we would aim to do a recording test, and we figured out the solution was to use the rest of our little content creation empire as the testbed.
If you caught episode 78 of our YouTube series, you’ll have noticed that it’s got me on camera, and engaging with the audience directly. We decided to use this episode as our recording test. Thus far it came out not too bad, though there are a number of issues with it, namely…
The camera height is too low
It should be higher and tilted down ever so slightly.
Need to do a better job of remembering where I am relative to the green screen behind me.
The lighting is a little rough in spots
Still playing with the ISO levels of the camera.
The audio gain is too high on the microphone and I’m ‘clipping’ a lot.
The recording quality needs to be higher
It’s a 4K camera, but I recorded it in 1080p.
Issues aside, as you can see in the final video, it came out looking not bad. So it’s gave us a really good starting point to build from. Plus, if you’re curious what it looks like without the chroma key and cropping…
My aim is for us to start recording parts of the lecture material this month, and critically the setup is largely built now in my office. So if I wanted to record a new video it will take all of 10 minutes to set up everything and get started in this format.
April’s Target
So last month I expected too much of myself, here’s what I aim to get done this month!
Finalise Chapters for Early-Access Review.
0: Introduction [DONE]
1: Foundations of AI [90% Complete]
2: Computing Fundamentals [75% Complete]
3: Basics of Search [70% Complete]
Finish Drafts of Chapters:
4: Tree Search Algorithms
Continue Writing
5: Constraint Satisfaction Problems
Start Writing
6: Planning Algorithms
7: Markov Models and MDPs
8: Intro to Game
9: A Brief History of Game AI
The plan is that once these chapters have been reviewed and vetted by the backers (i.e., you), then they go into recording and we start editing them up.
Wrapping Up
So yeah, it’s been a stressful month, but I can assure you we are on it! Critically, I hope to have stuff to show to all you wonderful backers in the coming weeks!
Thanks once again for your support, and I’ll catch you all next month!
-Tommy