Games | Probably Dance

June 12, 2022

Sudoku Variants as Playful Proof Practice

Doing mathematical proofs is kinda fun. Unfortunately they only make you do a few fun ones in school, then they get frustrating and tedious. So I have long been looking for a game that is about doing mathematical proofs. Euclidea was good, but eventually runs into the same problem as the hard proofs you do in school, so I never finished the game. But recently a lot of hard Sudoku variants have come along that feel exactly like doing a mathematical proof, but are designed to be fun.

The Sudoku world is currently going through an explosion of creativity and innovation, something which I have called a “Treasure Hunting System” before. It’s quite joyful to watch, especially since I never really got into Sudokus before. I found that when Sudokus get hard, they get more tedious instead of getting more interesting. They’re only fun until you get good enough to attempt the tedious ones. At least that’s what I thought until Youtube kept on recommending the Cracking the Cryptic channel, which currently features mostly Sudoku variants, and those are much more interesting.

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January 15, 2022

Automated Game AI Testing

In 2018 I wrote an article for the book “Game AI Pro 4” called “Automated AI Testing: Simple tests will save you time.” The book has since been canceled, but the article is now available online on the Game AI Pro website.

The history of this is that in 2017 there was a round table at the Game Developer Conference about AI testing. And despite it being the year 2017, automated testing was barely even mentioned. It was a terrible round table. A coworker who sat in the audience with me said to me that I could have given a better talk because I had invested a lot of work into automated testing. So next year I submitted a talk about automated AI testing and was rejected. But they asked me to write for the book instead. Now the book is canceled, too. A copy of the article is below, with some follow ups at the end. It’s written for people who have never done automated testing, like the AI programmers at the round table. But I think the core trick of doing fiber-based control flow, that can wait for things to happen, could be widely useful:

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April 3, 2021

Happy Easter! I hid an Easter Egg in Just Cause 4 for You

One of my favorite things to have worked on was the Getting Over It easter egg in Just Cause 4. It was quite popular. Since I love Getting Over It, I decided to make three more easter eggs, one for each DLC. Turns out that was impossibly ambitious, but I did manage to get one out. One of the DLCs contains a second Getting Over It easter egg that nobody has found yet:

I already did a subtle leak of this a while ago, so you can find the coordinates for this on some websites. But I must have been too subtle… Last easter didn’t feel right to do this bigger reveal (I had only recently left Avalanche, plus everyone’s brain was kinda fried thinking about covid) so this easter seems more appropriate. So find the coordinates online, or go looking based on the video. Happy easter egg hunting!

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March 28, 2020

A New Strategy Genre Grows Up: Survival Chaos, my New Favorite Game

I’ve had an obsession recently with a mod for Warcraft 3. It’s called Survival Chaos. I want to talk about it because it’s part of a genre of strategy games that hasn’t had a big success yet, and this feels like a big evolution, maybe even a breakthrough. It’s rare to see a new video game genre emerge like this, and nobody ever writes about this while it’s happening. The history of Auto Chess, the other recent genre to come out of Warcraft 3, is almost completely lost. (I was able to find a very similar map called “Pokemon Defense” from 2010, but that’s about it…)

I am not sure if the genre has a good name yet since it’s never been big. In StarCraft 2 it’s called “Tug Of War” so I’ll go with that. The basic idea is to make a RTS where you don’t control your units. You just build buildings, the buildings automatically make units, and you watch the units fight automatically. You mostly make decisions about the macro: When to invest in your economy, what units you should invest in, what upgrades you should get. Before we go any further though, let’s just watch a video of someone playing the game:

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January 29, 2020

Why Video Game AI does not Use Machine Learning

I used to be an AI programmer working on video games, and I’m currently trying to learn machine learning. As part of this I find myself having to repeatedly explain why video games don’t use machine learning. People seem to find it interesting enough because it’s not just the obvious reasons (machine learning is hard and far from solved for game playing) but it’s also about developer control and about making an understandable game for the player. Video game AI is designed to deliver a certain experience, which is more difficult to do with machine learning. So this blog post lists the main reasons why video game AI does not use machine learning.

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September 11, 2019

What Happened to the Real Time Strategy Genre

I replayed Warcraft III recently and was looking for other games I could play in the same genre. Turns out that outside of StarCraft 2, there are no recent games that are anywhere near as good. What happened?

This blog post was actually prompted by me watching a recommended video on Youtube about exactly this question, and the video gets it totally wrong:

The video really doesn’t answer the question, so lets look at what’s actually happening. Starting with whether strategy games somehow became less popular. The answer: Not really.

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June 8, 2019

Treasure Hunting Systems Found in the History of Video Games

A treasure hunting system is a system that unexpectedly puts out really good stuff. Proper treasure that makes people an enormous amount of money. An example is the Warcraft III modding community which invented several new genres of games and sprouted DotA, whose clones and offspring made their creators rich. (I don’t know how much money exactly, but Riot Games got acquired for $400 million, and their only product is a DotA-clone)

This has happened several times in the history of video games, but I didn’t link these together until I recently saw a talk about the Czechoslovakian game developer community before the iron curtain fell. The presenter talked about how the small country of Czechoslovakia had a thriving video game community despite the fact that you couldn’t buy computers in Czechoslovakia. But when I saw the talk I couldn’t help but think that “this reminds me of the Warcraft 3 modding community,” so I figured I should write up what these and other historical examples have in common so that we can build more systems that generate treasures.

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November 24, 2017

Games Are About Personal Development

Here’s an angle on the fundamental reason for why we play games: They are about personal development, learning about ourselves and about the world. This may not be a new angle, but I haven’t heard it stated this explicitly. Instead I have heard people say stupid things like “games teach hand-eye-coordination” which is true, but also bullshit because why would you spend this much time training your hand-eye-coordination? No I claim that games teach import life lessons, and that that is the fundamental reason why we play games.

I’m going to talk about video games, but this is also about games in general. Why do kids play with dolls? Because they want to learn about family life. (or about conflicts when playing with action figures) This is not explicit learning like we learn from a teacher, but you act out situations and adjust your behavior depending on how your play partner reacts. Why do we send our kids to football practice? Not because we think that they need to learn the valuable skill of kicking a ball into a net. No it’s because we want them to learn about working in teams and about pacing themselves and about playing fair and all that.

The things we learn are obvious in those scenarios. It’s well known that it’s important for kids to play in order to figure out how to act in the world in a safe environment. But I claim that the same thing is true for video games, and my example will be Super Mario World.

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October 9, 2017

Evidence For How To Make Great Games

Earlier this year I gave a talk about the Game Outcomes Project. I called that talk “Evidence For How To Make Great Games” because I think the Game Outcomes Project is the best data we have for what teams do that make great games. I wasn’t involved in the Game Outcomes Project, I just gave a talk about it because I really like it. Also I wanted to focus on different things than what they focused on in their own write-ups and talks.

People who saw the talk said that they really liked it, and they keep on telling me how much they liked it. So I decided to record the talk again and upload it.

The pitch for the talk is that the results of the Game Outcomes Project is the best evidence we have for what makes great game development teams and what makes bad game development teams. And I think that every game developer should know this stuff. So I talk about what you should focus on when making a game, and I give advice for how to get there. So the game outcomes project found “really successful teams do X” and I present that, and then also have a section at the end of the talk where I say “here is how you can actually get good at doing X.” Here is the talk:

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November 7, 2016

Lessons Learned from Shenzhen I/O

Shenzhen I/O is a brilliant game. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game about programming micro-controllers. It distills programming down to the fun parts, removing the inertia, self-inflicted complexity, overhead, uncertainty and drag of real programming. It’s just about coming up with clever tiny algorithms and micro-optimizing the heck out of them. It’s great alone, but it’s even better if you have a friend that’s playing at the same time. Competing on the leaderboards for puzzles is enormous fun. From playing that game, here are a couple lessons:

1. There is no optimal code. There is only code that’s faster than the code that you’re comparing to

Shenzhen I/O shows you a histogram of all the scores that other people have reached. If my solution would fall on the right of the bell curve, I would optimize it until I was on the left. After a lot of work I would usually arrive at an “optimal” solution that puts me in the best bracket on the histogram. Those solutions were always far from optimal.

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Category: Games

1. There is no optimal code. There is only code that’s faster than the code that you’re comparing to