Bug Reporting for Games with Companion AI

Companion AI characters, the allies who follow the player, fight alongside them, and interact with them, are a beloved feature and a notorious source of bugs, since AI is hard and a companion must navigate, fight, and behave convincingly across every situation the player creates. The bugs are infamous: a companion stuck or pathing absurdly, a companion that does not fight right, a follower that teleports or gets left behind, a behavior that breaks immersion. Like other AI-driven systems, these depend on the companion state and the situation it faced. Tracking companion AI bugs means capturing the companion behavior and situation behind an ally that misbehaved.

Companion AI is hard and bug-prone

Companion AI characters follow the player, fight alongside them, and interact with them, which requires the companion to navigate the world, make combat decisions, and behave convincingly across every situation the player creates, an AI challenge that is famously hard, since the player goes everywhere and does everything and the companion must cope. This makes companion AI notoriously bug-prone, with the infamous companion bugs, the ally stuck on geometry, the follower pathing absurdly, the companion that will not fight or fights wrong.

The bugs span the companion behavior: pathfinding bugs as the companion navigates the world and follows the player, combat bugs as it fights, behavior bugs as it acts and interacts, a companion stuck, lost, teleporting to catch up, doing something nonsensical, breaking the immersion of a believable ally. These emerge from the companion AI facing the situations the player creates, like the AI bugs of any AI-driven system but for a character that must keep up with the player everywhere. Understanding that companion AI is hard and bug-prone, with behavior, pathfinding, and combat bugs from the AI coping with player-created situations, frames the bug tracking: capture the companion state, behavior, and situation behind an ally that misbehaved.

Capture the companion state and behavior

The core context for a companion AI bug is the companion state and behavior, what the companion was doing, its AI state, its current behavior, following, fighting, idling, and why it was in that state, since a companion AI bug is about the companion behaving wrong and the AI state reveals what it was doing. Capture the companion state and behavior when a bug is reported, the companion AI decision and behavior at the time.

A report that the companion behaved wrong, got stuck, would not fight, did something nonsensical, becomes diagnosable when you can see the companion AI state and behavior, what it was trying to do and the decision it made, revealing the flaw in the companion AI, like capturing the AI state in any AI-driven system. The companion AI behavior is what the player experiences as right or wrong, and capturing the AI state behind it shows what the companion was doing and why. Capturing the companion state and behavior is the foundation, providing the companion AI decision and behavior against which a companion bug can be diagnosed, revealing what the companion was doing when it misbehaved.

Capture the situation the companion faced

Companion AI bugs depend on the situation the companion faced, since the AI behavior is a response to the situation, the world around it, the player position, the combat, the terrain, and a bug, the companion stuck, pathing wrong, fighting badly, occurs in a specific situation that the AI handled wrong. Capture the situation the companion faced, the relevant world state, the player position, the combat or navigation situation, when a bug is reported.

A companion AI bug, like any AI bug, depends on the situation, the companion stuck because of the specific geometry, the pathfinding failing because of the player position and the terrain, the combat behavior wrong because of the enemy situation, and capturing the situation lets you see what the companion AI faced and reproduce it. A report of a companion stuck or pathing wrong becomes diagnosable when you can see the situation, the geometry, the player position, the path. Capturing the situation the companion faced, alongside the companion state, gives you both what the companion was doing and the situation it was responding to, which together let you reproduce the companion AI bug, since the AI behavior is a response to the situation that produced the bug.

Watch following, pathfinding, and combat

The characteristic companion AI bugs cluster in following, pathfinding, and combat. Following bugs, the companion getting left behind, teleporting to catch up, not keeping up, losing the player, since the companion must follow the player everywhere, are common and immersion-breaking. Pathfinding bugs, the companion stuck on geometry, pathing absurdly, unable to navigate, since the companion must navigate the world the player explores, are the infamous companion bugs.

Combat bugs, the companion not fighting, fighting wrong, targeting badly, getting in the way, since the companion fights alongside the player, are equally common and frustrating. Capture the relevant context for each, the following state and player position for following bugs, the pathfinding and geometry for pathfinding bugs, the combat situation for combat bugs, since these are the companion AI main bug areas. Watching following, pathfinding, and combat, the three areas where companion AI bugs concentrate, and capturing the relevant context for each, covers the main companion AI bug dimensions, where the AI coping with following the player, navigating the world, and fighting produces the infamous companion bugs that break the believable-ally experience.

Setting it up with Bugnet

Add an in-game report option and attach the companion state and behavior, the situation the companion faced, the player position, and the following, pathfinding, or combat context as custom fields, with a screenshot. Bugnet stores them so a companion AI bug arrives with the companion-and-situation context needed to reproduce a following, pathfinding, combat, or behavior bug by recreating the situation the companion AI faced.

Group identical reports into occurrence counts, watching whether bugs cluster at locations, pointing at pathfinding-geometry issues, or in situations. Because companion AI is hard and bug-prone, the captured companion-and-situation context is what lets you reproduce the companion bug, seeing what the companion was doing and the situation it faced, finding whether it is a following, pathfinding, combat, or behavior bug, keeping the companion AI navigating, fighting, and behaving believably across the situations players create, which is exactly where the famously difficult companion AI produces its infamous bugs.

Test the companion across player situations

Because companion AI bugs depend on the situations the player creates, test the companion across many player situations, the varied terrains and geometry it must navigate, the combat situations it must fight in, the places the player goes, since the companion AI bugs appear in the situations the companion faces, and the player creates situations you did not anticipate, like testing any AI across the situations it encounters. Testing the companion across varied player situations catches the pathfinding, following, and combat bugs.

Pay special attention to the pathfinding in difficult geometry, the following in awkward situations, and the combat in varied encounters, since these are where the companion AI most often fails, much as you would test the edge cases of any AI. Pair the situation testing with your captured reports, which surface the companion bugs players hit in the situations you did not test, since players take companions places and into situations you could not anticipate. Together they keep the companion AI working across the situations players create, ensuring the ally follows, navigates, fights, and behaves believably wherever the player goes, which is the believable-companion experience the feature is meant to provide and where its famously hard AI produces its bugs.

Companion AI is famously hard. Capture what the companion was doing and the situation it faced behind every misbehaving ally.