Hey there! Welcome to my first devlog! Quick note, I’ll be posting updates on every other Friday so keep an eye out! Now grab yourself a coffee because it’s time for an origin story: how I made my first game!
Back in 2018, the final year of my bachelors, I had 9 weeks to do something fun for my research project. I had seen MarI/O by SethBling way back in 2015 and wanted to give this a try myself. The video explains how machine learning was used to play Mario.
What's machine learning you might ask? Well, it's pretty self-explanatory. Machines learning to do stuff!
Heads up! I knew absolutely nothing about game dev at the time. Or machine learning. Though I did follow this roll-a-ball series, which felt like a decade ago. But I was too enthusiastic to give up on my favourite combo. So I just jumped right into it!
I built my first game: 'Outrun3D' using Unity and Magicavoxel. It's a simple game where the goal is to drive furthest without crashing. But there's a catch! You have to pick up fuel cans or you'll run out of gas. The game also advances over time making it harder to play.
Woohoo! I managed to create not just one, but two AIs for my game.
Let's call them Lewis & Clark.
Lewis is what’s called a Scripted AI. He uses a series of hardcoded decisions for navigation, thus explaining the 'scripted' part. What you're seeing above is Lewis playing the game like a pro!
Building Clark was the most challenging. But a bit of 3Blue1Brown and The Coding Train did the trick. Clark is a self-learning AI who learns to play the game based on trial and error. He uses a genetic algorithm to train his neural network based on the inputs he gets from the sensors. In simpler terms, I made my computer learn to play the game and write the decisions for me.
And that was my first experience to both game dev and machine learning. Then I got graduated, took a year off trying out other things but wanting to come back to what I loved doing.
I took my dusty old project and started working. But that's a story for another day!
Thank you for taking the time to read my silly post! Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Facebook. I'm also making an origin story video on my YouTube channel so please make sure to subscribe :D Trust me, you don't want to miss that!
I'll see you on the 21st! 👋