James Muirhead

This project will produce a framework for designing and building an enemy AI system that invokes the emotional reaction of fear through practice. Specifically, a creepy, dread-inducing, and nightmarish fear. Incorporating the concepts of the Other, a staple of the horror genre, and Freud's concept of Uncanniness to induce this specific reaction. The practice began by designing an AI, aided by a close reading of relevant game design, media studies, and psychoanalytic literature. This design was then built as a prototype in the Unity game engine. The final prototype has taken the form of a simple first-person horror game with arbitrary goals for the player to collect whilst being hunted and pursued by the AI antagonist. The final stages of the project are compiling everything I have learnt into a post-mortem, which hopefully any designer can pick up and use as a guide when designing a similar AI.