Design

The Perfect Organism: The AI of Alien: Isolation

The xenomorph AI in Alien: Isolation set the benchmark for antagonists in horror games. I take a look at the
AI techniques used and the design choices made to maintain the terror throughout the campaign
experience.

Tommy Thompson 11 Min Read

October 31, 2017

IMAGE VIA CREATIVE ASSEMBLY

 The AI of Alien: Isolation | AI and Games #15

This article is an edited transcript of the AI and Games YouTube video

linked to above. AI and Games is a crowdfunded series on Patreon.

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.

‘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 nucl.ai 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.

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.

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.
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