The Chronicles of Spellborn official site has been updated with another edition of their continuing developer journal series.  In this week's Tech Journal, Maurits Fassaert writes about organic programming and emergent AI behavior.

So far my dev journals have concerned the process of game development. The intention is to explain something about the human side of making games. As representative of the tech department I should really be talking about technical stuff. Boring stuff. Well of course I don't find it boring, but for you, the gamer, it usually has little relevance. Art, content and sound are the aspects of a game that need to be noticeable. Tech is at its best when it is not noticeable. Tech needs to make sure the art, content and sound is delivered without glitches, without delays and without obvious trickery that breaks the suspension of disbelief. Finding out how it is done can be like finding out the trick behind a magician's performance. A programmer is cursed when playing games, because he'll see through the tricks faster. Explaining here how we are going to trick you with spellborn is something I'd like to avoid. Luckily there's a class of trickery, which is so mysterious that I'll make an exception for it.

Images, music, stories. These things are thoroughly ingrained in our culture. Since the dawn of mankind, experts have honed these arts to trick our senses. Modern game developers apply samples and polygons where pigskin drums and dirty lines on a cave wall used to be the height of entertainment. Likewise programming can be said to come from mathematics, an advanced form of counting beads on rope, but the application of mathematics as entertainment is a more recent development, unless you think dividing by zero is fun. Because of this there is still a lot of catching up to do. A lot of processing power is spent in modern operating systems trying to make the interface feel more natural, more human centered. In games a similar process is happening. We're still shooting monsters as we were in Doom, but they are no longer facing only 8 directions. When we kill them they no longer frag in the same over the top animation, but they fly away from the grenade's impact, shrapnel sticking from the exact places where it pierced the body.

Read the full developer journal here.