Lochlainn Brindley

Difficulty balancing is a key part of making a game fun to play. Often, designers focus on what should control the difficulty. Should it be the players themselves, or should it be automatic? However, that still leaves the question of how the difficulty can be changed in the first place. This is usually done either by tweaking values, like the player's health, or with different levels of enemy AI difficulty. Unfortunately, tweaked values can feel boring and since each level of enemy AI difficulty needs manually programmed, games don't usually have many of them. Generating enemy AIs with machine learning gets around the manual nature of traditional AI programming, giving a wider variety of difficulty options. This project aims to compare generated AIs with manually programmed AIs with the goal of demonstrating the generated AIs' effectiveness and giving game designers another tool for balancing games. You can play against both the traditional and generated AIs in a top-down shooter made for this project. Give it a try and see which you prefer!