Blitz licences Kynapse

Blitz Games has become the latest developer to adopt Kynogon’s Kynapse AI middleware for the development of a PS3 and Xbox 360 title.

It’s quite a surprise for the independent studio to licence third-party middleware, as Blitz Games CTO Andrew Oliver famously advocates that developers benefit greatly from building and using their own technology.

In an interview published earlier this week on developmag.com, Oliver spoke about how the company preferred to use its own technology because of a perceived lack of control over other people’s code.

“We’d always been in a position to fix our bugs, but suddenly there were bugs we couldn’t fix and had to wait on other people for. It was a massive concern for us,” explained Oliver.

But on the topic of why Blitz has chosen to licence a third-party module to complement the BlitzWare platform, Oliver said: “On this occasion we needed a very quick start. Since the game is very AI intensive and with several of our other development teams in the middle of their own next-gen games, we decided to turn to a third-party solution on this occasion, to guarantee success to our client.”

“We therefore took a detailed look at the architecture and tool-chain used by a number of AI middleware solutions and found that Kynapse provided the best fit with our own methods of production.”

Kynapse will be used alongside the BlitzWare platform, enabling Blitz to bolster its familiar in-house technology with Kynogon’s crowd AI expertise.

Pierre Pontevia, CEO of Kynogon SA, added: “We are delighted to be working with Blitz Games on this new exciting project. Blitz has an unrivalled reputation within the industry for the quality of its technology, and we are honoured to be providing middleware to the company.”