One New Team Member and Many Words Later
Backer Update: February 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 February 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!
It Takes Two (At Least) to Reach the Goal!
So perhaps the big thing that’s happened in the past two weeks is the team has expanded! As mentioned in the AI and Games sponsor newsletter earlier in the month we have a new producer joining in a part-time capacity who is taking on several responsibilities surrounding production and overall operations management. This is quite exciting because for the longest time this company has been just me, with the odd contractor coming on board when necessary. Now we’re officially a team of two people!
What does this mean? Well right now it’s about establishing processes around everything we do in the business such that I prioritise and focus on the things I should be focussing on. There’s a lot of additional work in business management, client comms, promotion and social media, aspects of the content creation pipeline and like… 101 things throughout the company that don’t necessarily need me working on them. But while I need not do these things, I am critical in other aspects. Most notably the writing and recording of a lot of the content we’re building here. So right now it’s building processes and having meetings to discuss how and where responsibilities can be taken off of me, such that I can focus on doing what I need to do.
And what I really needed to do this month, was launch the backer survey, and get on with writing the course!
Backer Survey is Live
The survey went live on January 27th, and so backers will have received an email in the last couple of weeks to complete the survey for the project. This aims capture any and all relevant information I need for the processing all rewards for pledges.
We’ve had a really good response rate to the survey thus far. With around an 85% completion rate. We’ll be keeping it open for a few months, but the sooner you get it signed up, then the sooner you can get in on what’s happening in and around the Goal State project. Including of course, the dedicated Discord Server category.
The Discord Area is Now Live
Earlier this month I went through the process of assigning the Goal State Kickstarter Backer role to anyone who a) signed up to the Kickstarter and b) had joined out Discord server!
It’s not been the most jam packed of locations thus far, as I’ve not had as many exciting updates to share. However, it will continue to fill up with more information as I begin to share it. Plus early drafts of the writing and videos will begin to appear in this area over time to allow for early-access and feedback.
If you haven’t joined the server already, you can reach it by visiting http://discord.aiandgames.com and then DM me in the server to ask for the role to be assigned to you!
You Should Be Writing!
So for me, right now, the priority has been writing. As mentioned in the January update, the plan is for me kick things off by writing up the theory part of the series in a book format - which will be the PDF booklet that will later be a backer reward. From this writing, I will then rework the text into video scripts for recording. My big priority for February was to get words done, and begin to figure out both the tone and level of detail we apply to the writing.
In last month’s planning, I nailed down that we have around 23 chapters to write, and so now as we approach the end of the month, I would say the first two chapters are largely complete (Course Introduction, and Foundations of AI). Meanwhile chapters 3 and 4 (Computing Fundamentals, and Basics of Search) and ongoing and I’m starting to structure chapters 5 (Tree Search Algorithms) and 6 (Constraint Satisfaction Problems) as I go.
Right now the actual ‘book’ is over 13,000 words in length and more than 25 pages long. It’s going to be a beast once it’s finished! Especially when you consider that this is only the ‘theory’ part of the course, given the practical elements will be separate. But it’s quite verbose in the opening chapters as I’m trying to cover a lot of information in an accessible way. In fact the Foundations of AI and Computing Fundamentals chapters are longer than you might, given I’m challenging a lot of base assumptions of people interested in AI. So both of these chapters are introducing very fundamental computer science concepts, but it means that the Basics of Search chapter is much shorter. Because for example, now I can simply talk about algorithms by their behavioural traits and time/space complexity - and everyone will know that means!
The fun part has been that I try to link a lot of these ideas to actual video games, and discuss what these ideas mean in the context of games. Despite my doing this a lot in my usual YouTube work, it’s weird being able to talk about what are more traditionally academic subjects in what I hope is a more engaging manner.
What’s Next? Plans for March
Right now, we have a handful of key things I want to get completed in March:
Finalise Chapters for Early-Access Review.
0: Introduction
1: Foundations of AI
2: Computing Fundamentals
Finish Drafts of Chapters:
3: Basics of Search
4: Tree Search Algorithms
Start More Chapters:
5: Constraint Satisfaction Problems
6: Planning Algorithms
7: Markov Models and MDPs
Run the recording tests with the new setup.
Critically, the recording tests got pushed back because I was spending more time this past week or so discussing production plans and rebuilding workflows to suit having two people on board! So it didn’t go according to my original plan, but now I think we are building a more practical and successful development plan!
The one thing that will interrupt my plans for March is I will be heading off to San Francisco for the Game Developers Conference (GDC). This will eat up over a week of my time as I will be in the US for about 10 days. But I still plan on writing when I have time. Nothing more rebel like writing about constraint propagation techniques while at 32,000ft.
March-ing Onwards
Yeah that was terrible. But I’m feeling good about the fact we’re pushing ahead and getting on with this project. Being able to see the writing take shape, and visualising how that will come together in the videos is rather exciting. We still have a long way to go, but now that we actually have a team of two, it’s helping me see how and where I can apply myself more effectively while ensuring we hit out targets!
Anywho, I look forward to sharing some more meaty info on how things are progressing next month. In the meantime thank you all once again for your support, and I’ll catch you all next month!
-Tommy