An Approach to Behavior Authoring for Non-Playing Characters in Digital Games

In this paper, we explore a design solution that would enable novice users to successfully author AI behaviors.
We detail on the first design pass over the representational vocabulary and the authoring activity created to identify an appropriate user interaction approach. Further, we discuss the results of a user study conducted to evaluate a paper mock-up of the authoring interface that novice users can use to create behaviors. The goal of the study was to understand whether users are able to conduct the authoring process using the proposed paper prototype version and to understand the representational vocabulary.
One of the key results that came out of the study was that some of the existing interaction design approaches, representation formalism and vocabulary that we employed in the authoring interface were unsuitable to novice users. The study also helped pointing out early design flaws and new design insights for the work going forward.