Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
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Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
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Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#2Seems unlikely to work imo. Games need to account for the fact that 90% of the player base will be deeply unskilled and the remaining 10% will be tightly invested in a meta of dominant strategies. You’d need the bots to be able to consider this and also not just equalize every character.
Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#3Seems unlikely to work imo. Games need to account for the fact that 90% of the player base will be deeply unskilled and the remaining 10% will be tightly invested in a meta of dominant strategies. You’d need the bots to be able to consider this and also not just equalize every character.
Yeah. A truly balanced game is boring. There’s no drama or tension.
You need the power fantasy of being strongest characters and the underdog tale of winning against the strongest characters as a less meta one.
Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#4Seems unlikely to work imo. Games need to account for the fact that 90% of the player base will be deeply unskilled and the remaining 10% will be tightly invested in a meta of dominant strategies. You’d need the bots to be able to consider this and also not just equalize every character.
Yeah. A truly balanced game is boring. There’s no drama or tension. You need the power fantasy of being strongest characters and the underdog tale of winning against the strongest characters as a less meta one.
Why not abandon the idea of balance entirely and tailor balance situational for maximum drama.make the meta shakespearean..
Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. A truly balanced game is boring. There’s no drama or tension. You need the power fantasy of being strongest characters and the underdog tale of winning against the strongest characters as a less meta one.
Why not abandon the idea of balance entirely and tailor balance situational for maximum drama.make the meta shakespearean..
Valve memorably did just this over a decade ago with the Director system in Left4Dead.
Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#6Programmers always want to automate content creation. I get it as I’m a coder and it’s a fun problem space. Plus creating content is super time and skill intensive. It’s really hard to get right in my experience. Kind of like trying to automate writing a novel…
OK I read the article. I'm very skeptical of this approach. I doubt we can actually uncover fitness functions that reliably maps to "fun", and I believe it would require huge engineering effort to keep the game "simulable." Their examples aren't convincing. What would be convincing is a full, complex, and _fun_ game using these techniques.
Also the article seems like an ad for their AI solution.
Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. A truly balanced game is boring. There’s no drama or tension. You need the power fantasy of being strongest characters and the underdog tale of winning against the strongest characters as a less meta one.
Why not abandon the idea of balance entirely and tailor balance situational for maximum drama.make the meta shakespearean..
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Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#8Seems unlikely to work imo. Games need to account for the fact that 90% of the player base will be deeply unskilled and the remaining 10% will be tightly invested in a meta of dominant strategies. You’d need the bots to be able to consider this and also not just equalize every character.
This can be accounted for by training bots using player inputs from historical games, no? If you then partition the training set by player ranking, you'd presumably get a set of bots that approximate a player from each ranking. With that, you could simulate the effect of a balance change on players of various skill levels.
Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#9Programmers always want to automate content creation. I get it as I’m a coder and it’s a fun problem space. Plus creating content is super time and skill intensive. It’s really hard to get right in my experience. Kind of like trying to automate writing a novel… OK I read the article. I'm very skeptical of this approach. I doubt we can actually uncover fitness functions that reliably maps to "fun", and I believe it wo…
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Re: Supporting game design with evolutionary algorithms
#10Seems unlikely to work imo. Games need to account for the fact that 90% of the player base will be deeply unskilled and the remaining 10% will be tightly invested in a meta of dominant strategies. You’d need the bots to be able to consider this and also not just equalize every character.
This can be accounted for by training bots using player inputs from historical games, no? If you then partition the training set by player ranking, you'd presumably get a set of bots that approximate a player from each ranking. With that, you could simulate the effect of a balance change on players of various skill levels.
Not really. It would take immense effort to train bots to play “like humans” and not “as performantly” as humans which is very different. And if you’re going to be optimizing game parameters that means you’re assuming that either the AI doesn’t change its behaviors even though the game is different or you’re assuming that humans will adapts in the same way the bots do.
Like if all the humans use the AK because it’s super over powered, and your optimization algorithm sets the AK damage to 0; what are your “human” bots going to do? Because all the training data says to use the AK.
This approach only makes sense if you’re evaluating bot-optimal play outcomes.
It also takes away a lot of the design thinking behind balance. You probably don’t want to nerf the AK. You probably want to buff counterplay options (guns are not a great example but still)