Abstract
It is widely assumed that evolution has the potential to make better video games. However, relatively few commercial games have been released that use evolution as a core game mechanic, and of these games only a very small sub-set have shown that evolution occurs as expected and improves game play as intended. Thus, there remains a critical gap between studies showing the clear potential of evolution to improve video games and studies showing that evolution did improve game play in a commercially released game.
We have developed Darwin’s Demons, a space shooter inspired by old style arcade games, with the added feature of evolving enemies. In August, 2016 Darwin’s Demons was Green-lit for sale on Steam, a standard benchmark for commercialization of games. In this paper we present and test four hypotheses that form the basis for the claim that evolution occurs and improves game play in Darwin’s Demons. More generally, these hypotheses can be used to confirm that evolution meets the intended design goals for other evolutionary games.
Our results support the hypotheses that evolution makes Darwin’s Demons get progressively more difficult over the course of a game, and that the fitness function, player choices, and player strategy all affect the evolutionary trajectory during a single game. This suggests that in Darwin’s Demons, the enemies adapt to the player’s decisions and strategy, making the game interesting and increasing its replayability.
This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. DBI-0939454, the Vandal Ideas Project, and by NSF Grant DMS-1029485. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Hastings, E.J., Guha, R.K., Stanley, K.O.: Evolving content in the galactic arms race video game. In: 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games, pp. 241–248. IEEE (2009)
Muñoz-Avila, H., Bauckhage, C., Bida, M., Congdon, C.B., Kendall, G.: Learning and game AI. Dagstuhl Follow-Ups 6 (2013)
Risi, S., Lehman, J., D’Ambrosio, D.B., Hall, R., Stanley, K.O.: Combining search-based procedural content generation and social gaming in the petalz video game. In: Aiide. Citeseer (2012)
Risi, S., Lehman, J., D’Ambrosio, D., Hall, R., Stanley, K.: Petalz: search-based procedural content generation for the casual gamer (2015)
Stanley, K.O., Bryant, B.D., Miikkulainen, R.: Real-time neuroevolution in the nero video game. IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput. 9(6), 653–668 (2005)
Stanley, K.O., Bryant, B.D., Karpov, I., Miikkulainen, R.: Real-time evolution of neural networks in the nero video game. In: AAAI, vol. 6, pp. 1671–1674 (2006)
Jallov, D., Risi, S., Togelius, J.: Evocommander: a novel game based on evolving and switching between artificial brains. IEEE Trans. Comput. Intell. AI Games (2016)
Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N., Togelius, J.: Adapting models of visual aesthetics for personalized content creation. IEEE Trans. Comput. Intell. AI Games 4(3), 213–228 (2012)
Liapis, A., Martınez, H.P., Togelius, J., Yannakakis, G.N.: Transforming exploratory creativity with delenox. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Computational Creativity, pp. 56–63. AAAI Press (2013)
Cachia, W., Aquilina, L., Martínez, H.P., Yannakakis, G.N.: Procedural generation of music-guided weapons. In: 2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG), pp. 1–2. IEEE (2014)
Hoover, A.K., Cachia, W., Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G.N.: AudioInSpace: exploring the creative fusion of generative audio, visuals and gameplay. In: Johnson, C., Carballal, A., Correia, J. (eds.) EvoMUSART 2015. LNCS, vol. 9027, pp. 101–112. Springer, Cham (2015). doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16498-4_10
Schumacher, J.: Species (2016)
Schrum, J., Miikkulainen, R.: Constructing game agents through simulated evolution (2015)
Avery, P., Togelius, J., Alistar, E., Van Leeuwen, R.P.: Computational intelligence and tower defense games. In: 2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), pp. 1084–1091. IEEE (2011)
Schell, J.: The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses. CRC Press, Boca Raton (2014)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Soule, T., Heck, S., Haynes, T.E., Wood, N., Robison, B.D. (2017). Darwin’s Demons: Does Evolution Improve the Game?. In: Squillero, G., Sim, K. (eds) Applications of Evolutionary Computation. EvoApplications 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10199. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55849-3_29
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55849-3_29
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-55848-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-55849-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)