RealTime Rogue is a prototype realtime game developed in Unity that uses third person action games mechanics mixed with strategic and rpg elements. Game was design to provide a good challenge level, thanks to our NPCs trained with Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms.
The project was part of a Master thesis in Computer Engineering at Università degli Studi di Firenze, with title "RealTime Rogue: Deep Reinforcement Learning for Believable NPC Behaviors in Action RPGs", made under the supervision of Alessandro Sestini. This game studies DRL problems in real time games after a previous work called DeepCrawl [1].
- Player has to defeat his enemies in every room to reach the next level;
- Player can enhance its characteristics in some rest room;
- Player and NPCs have to collect items, like potions and power swords, to win the rooms;
- The game ends when the character dies, like other Rogue Lite games.
The core business of our thesis was to create NPCs with intelligent AI with DRL. In particolar our NPCs have to be:
- credible and they have to adopt clever strategies to defeat the player;
- imperfect, because we do not want super-human opponents;
- prior-free, this means that the programmer do not design specific NPC behaviors, so agents must learn independently the best strategy;
- various, in this game there are 2 different NPC classes (warrior and wizard) to get a good variety level.
The algorithm used in this project is Proximal Policy Optimization [2] (implemented in TensorFlow).
[1] Alessandro Sestini, Alexander Kuhnle, and Andrew D. Bagdanov. DeepCrawl: Deep reinforcement learning for turn-based strategy games, 2020.
[2] John Schulman et al. Proximal policy optimization algorithms. CoRR, abs/1707.06347, 2017.