Day One - New idea
BlueDragon on 2012/05/06 09:27
of BlueDragon's Code Factory
The previous one was a vague idea about making some weird species escape from the lab of a mad scientist - those specimen would move on their own but you could somehow provide hints to help them find the way across a maze or some kind of difficult terrain.
The new idea comes from the fact that as Ernie pointed out, MAD can also stand for Mutual Assured Destruction.
So this is the incipit of my game:
"It's 2099 and the world is on the edge of a new World War. Nations strive for control of the last resources remaining on Earth. However, everybody knows that fighting an all out war with super-nuclear, plasma and graviton bombs would only bring one obvious outcome: mutual assured destruction (M.A.D).
Thus, War will be fought by single robots - each nation having its champion fighting for her.
Robots fight on their own, without external guidance, powered by artificial neural networks.
No human involved in fighting, no human will be hurt... only robots.
These robots are known as M.A.D. Robots.
As the leading scientist in your country, you will have to design and assemble the most clever and powerful robot and beat all the rest."
The game will let you design your own robot, by assembling various parts, e.g. sensors, guns, movement parts (e.g. legs or wheels) and so on.
One core feature of the game is that once you design your robot, it will fight on its own.
The robot will really have an artificial neural network deciding its action - training the neural network and deciding some its properties will be part of the game.
Every fight is 1 country vs 1 country (1 robot vs 1 robot) on a best of 5: if you win 3 times on 5 you conquer that country, earning resources.
More resources means you can build better parts for your robot, including better neural networks.
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So far the idea looks good (to me) but there are going to be a few challenges:
- having the robot fight on its own could be boring, especially if it fights badly
While I'm absolutely newb at graphics in general, I will try to include as many special effects as possible to make the battle entertaining.
- it could turn out to be impossible to train the neural network to fight in a nice way
- training neural networks can easily involve a lot of processing power. Having to wait 20 minutes with cpu @ 100% before your robot is trained and ready to fight would be no good.
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Enough talking, let's now dive into some code.
Oh, and I just started Chronolapse ( http://keeyai.com/projects-and-releases/chronolapse/ )
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Comments
Hugoagogo on
2012/05/08 11:25:
spirulence on
2012/05/08 01:26:
I like this idea!I have the same fears about the neural network - my guess is you will end up deciding that it's simply easier to have the player control the robot and doing more traditional AI for each other robot.
In my head I'm imagining The Hunger Games with robots. :)