My role: Programmer, Team Leader, Narrative Designer
Responsible for gameplay programming. Implemented an AI opponent with ML-Agent in Unity.
Managed a team of 5 members and establish a working pipeline with a project management tool.
The Near World is a story-rich adventure game with a unique 3D-pixel art style. A self-saving story spans seven years in a world where time travel does not exist.
AI opponent with reinforcement learning
In order to persuade a former bassist to join the band, the player needs to surpass him by 100 points in this pinball game.
This Mini game is like a tribute to the earliest game console Pong. Each player controls a baffle to hit the ball, and when the opponent does not hit the ball, he scores a point. For the player’s opponent to be more like a human (rather than simply moving with the position of the ball), I used the ML-Agents tool provided by Unity to apply deep reinforcement learning to achieve the AI of the opponent.
Interestingly, there is no way in reality to give AI real emotions like in this game, but AI can perform very well when playing the mini game. The picture below shows the RL training process.
For players, this game is very easy to get started, but difficult to beat the AI opponent who has experienced tens of millions of training.
However, the robot (N-16) we met will resolve this difficulty for players.
Positive Feedbacks
We release this game on itch.io and received ratherly good feedbacks. One player connected with his own stories of fighting depression, and some players liked the graphics style very much and look forward to follow-up development.
