This month we've seen something quite special: the first ever game jam for the
AI and Games community. Viewers of the show were tasked with building their own games
and submitting them to the jam within a one week timeframe: creating a fun, exciting but
still demanding marathon of game creativity. While one week might seem like a long time,
it can still prove to be a very demanding timeframe when building an AI for a game.
Of course the big challenge can often be to satisfy the theme: which in this case 'Breaking
the Rules'. This is a theme designed to give you a lot of flexibility, given it can easily apply in
so many elements of aesthetics, core mechanics or even the behaviour of AI systems. When a game was
submitted to the jam, we asked that the developers explain how it works. Meaning we could get some
insight into how what might a seemingly complex game was achieved really easily, or vice versa.
It's the first time we've attempted to run an event of this kind for the community,
and I've been blown away by the response. We had just shy of 900 signups for the event,
resulting in 128 entries being submitted in the end: with the event appearing as one of
the featured jams on itch.io where it was hosted - which when you consider the competition out there,
that's really saying something. Our Discord server was booming with activity, as people shared ideas,
works in progress and helped one another out with challenges they faced. Resulting in a bevvy of fun
and interesting games. All in all, it has vastly exceeded my expectations.
It was important afterwards that everyone had a chance to have their say
and check out the games involved: be it to leave feedback or just have their say on
what were the most fun and interesting experiences people had constructed.
Hence the public could vote and leave feedback on the games that excited them the most
and we had just over 1600 ratings submitted across all games. Plus this helps me get an idea of what
the community thought were interesting and how my opinions my fare against yours as I sat down
and checked out the top 60 submissions. Yes that's right, I sat and played them
all, or at least tried to. My Windows Defender is really not happy with me right now.
I'm Tommy Thompson, this is AI and Games, and with all that said, let's get into the jam submissions.
There's a huge range of different ideas here not to mention tech, with games submitted built in
Unity, GameMaker, Godot, Unreal Engine and more. What I'm about to list is not necessarily a 'best
games of the jam' list. By all means you can check out the full list on itch.io,
where you can see our highest ranked game overall was Break the Rule by X&Immersion. But rather,
this video is about the games that I personally enjoyed the most or piqued my curiosity that I
really wanted to give them so air time. Hence you'll find they're not all from the top 10 of
the public rating, but a mish mash of stuff throughout the rankings. So here they are,
in no particular order, my favourite games of the 2021 AI and Games Jam.
First up we'll start with Hamlet, a game in which the theme is utilised to break the
rules of a puzzle game when it's convenient for you. Your robot can only move forward,
but different coloured tiles influence its behaviour, such as doing 90' or 180' turns
or even teleporting. The AI part, is that the levels were procedurally generated beforehand,
with some minor editing to ensure they're fully playable. This type of puzzle game is often quite
interesting to try and procedurally generate at runtime, given you effectively need to encode
your design rules for a given level, as well as a solver within the game that can ensure a
given level is completable. It's simple, but it's quite fun and has a lot of potential.
Dummy Fight is an interesting cross of the arena style combat of Smash Bros.
with the epic boss fights of Dark Souls. Players go one on one against an AI adversary powered by
a Finite State Machine, with a little bit of Utility AI along the way in order to help it
decide on specific states to transition into. The enemy is balacing what it should do based on the
players current distance and spepd alongside it's own internal timers for specific moves or
attacks. While it's still got some refinements to make - including a little more awareness of
arena boundaries - there is a a nugget of fun in here, both as a multiplayer game, but also as a
game built around individual boss characters having unique attack patterns and designs.
The award for 'cool looking game that I couldn't play for shit' goes to Aquatic Deceptions.
A game about identifying fish that are changing colour. A great example of
using flocking behaviours to create interesting characters moving around a fixed environment.
It's conceptually a great idea. You tag the fish that are changing colour - therefore breaking
the rules - in the scene. However, the timer is incredibly punishing and this - combined
with the fact I am colour blind - made this impossible for me to even finish one level.
If anything, I think changing the game from a fixed timer counting down
to a timer that goes up with ratings based on time completed, would make this a much more
enjoyable and relaxing game than it currently is, given the fish are very fun to watch.
Plus a special shout out to Penny de Byl and their Holistic 3D YouTube channel,
given it was Penny's Udemy series that inspired this work.
Attack of the Normally Genetically Engineered Robots, or ANGER, is an interesting tower
defense game, in that while it's using a lot of rudimentary AI for the towers and such,
the really interesting part is the robots themselves. Robots are generated using a
genetic algorithm as such their traits, such as resistance to specific weaponry,
their speed and such are unique to them but they can breed new robots between waves. Each robot is
assessed on how well they perform in a given wave, and the best robots are then used to make more
robot babies. Meaning that the as they increase in number, they also get harder to fight against.
Now we first get a tower defense, then there's also real-time strategy. Grid Wars is an RTS
game about collecting tiles of the map, and building units and breaks the rules by allowing
the player to possess individual units and guide the flow of battle. Pretty impressive to see a
full albeit simplified RTS appear in the jam within that one-week timeframe. The developers
acknowledge the game uses an implementation of Goal Oriented Action Planning (y'know,
the AI of F.E.A.R.) and I think there's scope for a lot more work to create a streamlined RTS game.
Although I did find possessing the robot completely breaks the game
as I could wipe out the opponent single handedly. But hey, that's because I'm a persistent sonuva...
Certainly one of the most novel entries was Sandflag.
This game is inspired by playing at the beach, where you would play a sort of
jenga-esque game of scooping away sand and the player who knocks down the most flags loses.
It's really well put together and the terrain deformation is a really
engaging challenge. What's interesting to me is how frustrating the AI is to play against.
It certainly took a few tries to begin to spot what areas of the terrain
I should be targeting so as to stop the AI player exploiting it when it was their turn.
The AI itself is running a relatively straightforward process of assessing points
on the map to determine how risky it would be to shift the sand at that point. It then prioritises
moving the in-game cursor around the areas it has ranked as the safest for it to pursue.
What's fun is you'll no doubt have spotted, we can actually see it in action.
It visualises the decision making in a way that helps players understand what's happening,
the rationale for decisions that were taken
and gives you some guidance on how to act in future playthrough. Fantastic work.
The award for most 'bwaaaaaaaaaarrrm's on the title screen goes to Eye of the Big Brother.
A really funny traffic management simulator, where your job is to identify who is not obeying
the traffic laws and punish them. The game employs a complete traffic system, with cars
moving at a defined speed limit, driving between junctions, waiting at lights and then continuing
on throughout a small city. Your job is to spot cars that go above the speed limit or ignore the
traffic lights and blow them to smithereens, with new junctions opening up as you score
more cash for eliminating rulebreakers. The game has a really nice sense of humour, the game is
really well put together, and obliterating traffic violators is incredibly satisfying.
Wendell Tank is arguably my favourite application of the theme. It's a clone of the top-down
2-player gun battles that you would typically see in the likes of Combat on the Atari 2600,
but this time around the opponent is not only a simple AI, but one that begins to cheat the
more that you win. The longer you play the game, it begins to break the established rules: you
might not be able to move or fire for a round, the walls might now be destructable or they might try
to kill you. There's a lot of different ways in which the increasingly frustrated computer player
can go about breaking the game to suit their needs and I was laughing all the way through it.
Overall, it's a really fun application of the
theme and it makes for what is ultimately a really enjoyable 10-15 minute playthrough.
The award for most visually impressive has to go to Inhabitants of the Fir Forest:
a game that has had a lot of interest come its way from lets players who checked it out
prior to me! The creator is a big fan of making horror games in Unreal Engine,
and so this looks like a continuation of that body of
work, with each game building on the experience from the previous one. I think's that's really
evident given the visual polish and tight pacing. The environmental art, plus cutscenes
and a small but building narrative really sets a tone that makes the game quite distinct.
The AI itself is predicated on the enemy you fight at the end,
which is done very much in a souls-like fashion. Given that this was completed
with a few days to spare, it leaves a lot of scope for future improvements of the combat.
Though much of that is reliant on the animations and other art assets being place.
Doesn't really fit the theme, but certainly one to keep an eye out for in the future.
Perhaps one of the most literal applications of the theme is Crimebots. Players have their own
little army of bots that are all active and moving around the map committing crimes. However, they
only commit crimes because they are programmed to do so. There's actually a fully fledged
token-based language parser in here that lets you design specific actions and then have the robot
commit them in sequence. The robots themselves are then running on a finite state machine
to move around and execute behaviours. All the while, there's idle dummy bots you can reprogram
and the police are on your tail to beat you up and drag you away for committing robo crime.
It's evident that the game intends to ramp up to the chaos seen on screen now and that players
would gradually be introduced to each new function they can execute, so it does mean playing it at
the end of the jam can seem quite anarchic and difficult to understand, but there is a lot of
potential here. A very cool idea and despite it's ambition is quite nicely polished too. Great job.
Next up is Break the Sky, which is a hot contender for my most replayed game of the jam.
A conceptually simple game of flying around and shooting down waves of enemies. The fun part is
that your ship has no weapons, and instead you rely on a series of drones that fly around you,
acting as both firepower and shields. Once you run out of drones, you have no means to fight back or
to defend yourself. So using the drones to protect you and defeat enemies is the key to survival.
The AI here is in two forms. first there is the basic movement of enemies,
some of which use a nice steering maneuver to follow you and keep pace.
But the highlight has to be the drones you utilise. A flocking algorithm is employed
that has the drones not only surround the ship, but they move to the back of the
pack when they are reloading. Plus you can change the layout to be tighter or broader
depending on the type of attack you want to make. It's very well put together and a lot of dun.
Oh and for reference, I believe the developers addressed the theme, by breaking the rules of the
jam and ignoring the theme. Which means next time I really need to come up with something less meta.
Wave Function Cat Labs is a simple cat and mouse game with a twist. Each run of the game
uses a procedural generation algorithm (notably Wave Function Collapse) to generate the maze.
But the player can only see a certain amount of the map at any point in time using their
immediate field of view, and this is where it gets interesting. The map is only being procedurally
generated when you look at it. So if you turn away from looking at a particular part of them map,
and then look again, there's a good chance that the map has completely changed. This also applies
to the cats you collect to score points, as a reference to the Schrodingers cat experiment).
This ever evolving map, combined with the fact some some evil cat monster thingy is chasing you,
makes for a really interesting dynamic. You can drop bombs that illuminate an area of the map
and eliminate the enemy, at the cost of losing a fixed chunk of map space to follow.
All in all one of the most novel level generation ideas I've seen. Great stuff.
Last but most certainly not least, is Tic Tac Robot. Now, when I first saw this in the
ratings it took me by surprise. It's about playing naughts n crosses, or Tic Tac Toe.
But it ranked 3rd in the public vote. There's a lot going on here and it's one of the most
polished and nicely put together games in the entire jam. First of all, the AI in the game
is actually a lot of procedural elements and the bot player itself. The robot arm, and its movement
and behaviour are part of the AI codebase, the poor person in the water in the corner is using
a procedural inverse kinematics system to have them float and move in the tank. Plus of course
there's the behaviour and decision making of the robot itself when it's playing tic-tac-toe.
I am not going to talk about the actual playing of the game, because there's a full-blown narrative
here and to go into detail would deny you some of the genuine twists and turns this game makes - and
yes it's a game about playing tic-tac-toe. It has a complete story that takes around 10 minutes to
complete, and if you're curious, go on the jam page, download it and try it out - or watch the
developers full playthrough on YouTube. This one was a real gem and genuinely took me by surprise.
This is but a fraction of the total games submitted to the jam,
and there's a lot of really cool stuff in here.
It took me several nights to work my way through them all and if you've enjoyed the video,
I strongly encourage you check them out. There's some fun and definetely weird stuff in there
that I enjoyed checking out, including dancing NPCs in the Anti Sobriety Scavanger by Desktoy.
That was um.... certainly something, reminded me of clubbing Glasgow.
Once again congratulations to you all, some very impressive stuff throughout here. It's been great
fun to play through these. I want to take a moment to thank everyone once again for taking part.
I hope you all enjoyed your time with us and gained something from the experience.
In fact I really hope some of these games continue on and receive
some form of full-fledged release be it on Steam or elsewhere. If that does happen,
get in touch either on Discord or Twitter and let us cheer you on.
Plus a special thanks to our Jaminators: our moderation team within the AI and Games community,
who helped give support and guidance throughout every day (and night) whereever you were in the
world. Plus a final shout out to our Patreon community, because it was them banging the
drum asking for a jam to happen, so you can really thank them for bullying me into doing it.
If you are a little disappointed you missed out, fear not. I have deliberately referred
to this as the 2021 AI and Games Jam, thus providing sufficient scope for a future event
like in say, 2022. Be sure to subscribe to the channel to catch announcements for
future events - and who knows, you might like some of the other stuff that appears here too.
Take care folks, I'll be back.