Quest Lecture #31 Sreyeesh Garimella "Building Smarter Game Bots"

Smart game AI doesn’t need randomness or black-box machine learning to feel intelligent. This Quest Lecture features Sreyeesh Garimella with the keynote “Building Smarter Game Bots: Deterministic NPCs Explained”. In this session, Sreyeesh breaks down how deterministic NPC systems can create clear, debuggable, and surprisingly expressive behavior across genres: from FPS and third-person games to roguelikes. Instead of opaque AI models, the focus is on rule-driven systems where behavior is intentional, predictable, and easy to reason about. Using a live Unity demo built with simple primitives, you’ll see how deterministic decision-making works in practice, how predictable systems can still lead to emergent gameplay, and why this approach is especially powerful for solo developers, small teams, and real production environments.