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[VinceTwelve]

Ok, I had a lot of fun on the A Game By Its Cover competition and I'm deep enough into this to have some idea where it's headed.  So, let's make a thread.

Carrot vs. Stick

CVS is a soccer/football-like game played entirely by AI controlled players.  You build a team and train them to play the game well by using either the carrot (reward) or the stick (punishment). 

Each player on your team uses a rudimentary neural network to decide what to do.  At first, they're all bumbling idiots who occasionally might accidentally do something right.  With enough training, they could be a crack squad of stone-cold strikers. (That's a football thing, right?)

Eventually, you can challenge your AI team to take on your friends' AI team, or enter your team into a global tournament.  You know, if I get that far.

Currently, I've got the bumbling idiots part done.

Planned features:
-Train your team members against each other to improve the team.
-Left click a player to reward him for good behavior.  Right-click him to administer punishment.
-Players earn experience while playing, so you can level up their speed, acceleration, kicking power, height, etc.
-Get a coded string from a friend to train or play against their team.
-Enter your team into a tournament.  You can watch the games play out.
-Non-interactive tournament games play out based on your neural network's values and the game's seed value.
-Player stats
-Team/player customization?

[AD1337]

Sounds very promising, I like the idea of interaction only through rewarding or punishing. Simple and elegant.

[Ben H]

Sounds like a great idea!
So you train each player individually?
What's the window of behaviour for reward/punishment, a few seconds?
I don't know if it's too evolution-y for your game idea but I'd want to breed new teams of players based on a few good players that I've trained.

Really looking forward to this

[Pierrec]

Woah...and you're planning to do this on Adventure Game Studio ?
Man you're a god to me!

[VinceTwelve]

Cool, thanks guys!

Ben H: The idea of "breeding" them together to evolve new players is a great one!  I'll see if that's possible.  The structure of the neural network is still coming into focus for me.

Pierrec: Yup.  Ole reliable.

Edit: I've got the ball moving around and all the players reacting to the ball, but so far all they do is run straight at the ball and sit there once they've got it.  Next to implement the offensive activities dribbling, passing, and shooting. Baby steps.

[VinceTwelve]

Working on the game over lunch, I tried implementing jumping and wound up with all the players just flying around the screen instead. Close enough.



I also cranked up the number of players on screen to 200 just to see what that would do to the FPS.  No effect (game is currently capped at 40fps).  Yay!

Working on adding more things for them to do to the decision matrix.  Then comes the fun of trying to interconnect/balance the thing so they can actually play something resembling soccer.  What you see above is everyone detecting that they are not carrying the ball (it's bouncing in the middle of the screen) and thus they are all trying to get open.

My programmer art needs to be done away with at some point as well.