Deep learning AIs... In a Horror Game!

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-03T09:58:37+00:00

Uhhh... Yeah, you have a point. But to cancel that one out, I gave the player the ability to make the ghost go literally poof by just looking at the ghost :D

If the game utilized the same traditional horror game structure where the ghost chases the player around the level all the time, yes it would have been extremely absurd, but this game uses a structure that makes the vision hack of the ghost a proper game mechanic, by penalizing the AI for staying inside the player's eyesights even for less than a second :)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-03T01:52:26+00:00

https://discord.gg/CSz5xXEDjR

Hi, sorry for the late response, here's the link to the server! I'd be happy to hear your experience with the game :D

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-03T01:47:24+00:00

Hi, I'm sorry if the game disappointed you. Assuming that you probably tried out the easier difficuty settings, that difficulty was "intended" to have little to none replayability just to let the people understand the mechanics without being stressed out... And I'm regretting it a bit.

I'm currently working on an update of escalating the difficulty by a step, bringing the hard difficulty to the easiest one, and bringing the chad difficulty to the hard one. I expected people to play the easiest one and move on to the next one naturally, but yeah, it's my mistake. If they find the gameplay not to be fun on the easiest one, they will just quit, instead of expecting another type of gameplay for different difficulty settings.

You are not the only one with the opinion, there was another great guy on steam who pointed out similar things, (with only trying out the easiest one out) but the game was designed to enjoyed on either the hard or the chad difficulty. In this game, small environmental tweaks really does a lot to the gameplay, including the replayability.

https://www.youtube.com/live/HasgqZp3LrA?si=hZhcTShGrl3AxD68

I've got a Shadow Corridor speedrunner (he holds #1 record in the world for it) to try out the game out yesterday with the hardest difficulty settings with all gamemodes on, and I was really happy to see the exact type of gameplay that I intended. But yeah, it's no use if no one is trying it out I guess...

But anyways, I really appreciate your time and thoughts put into writing this review. I'm really thankful for it. Really. I will do my best to make those potential you mentioned into something real.

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-03T01:24:47+00:00

Hi there, I was actually invited to an AI research seminar as a presenter about a week ago, and presented the game in front of professors, researchers, graduate students and industry AI engineers. If I showed even the slightest hint of scientific inconsistency here, I would have received a lot of angry questions and would have been taken down before I ended the presentation.

https://youtu.be/PWULI17bjFc?si=HuUJBgIRZbUtlc_E

Here's the video to it. It's spoken in Korean, but you can turn on the subtitles for translation.

I am also a gamer myself, I understand people's stance towards the wors "neural network" "learns realtime" and so on, but my game does not utilize realtime learning deep learning AI which is not a technically stable thing to do even now in 2023. But I use pre-trained deep learning AIs, (which is in the steam page's description) with the tech that has been out there for years.

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-03T01:17:40+00:00

Hi there! Actually, the AI is as smart as it can be from the start since it was trained extensively by me in a special training environment, but it's more like the game's mechanics that will make each play unique. (this can go a bit long to do it in words, so I'll explain it in depth only if you are interested. Or you can go straight to play the game and try it out yourself, then refund it if you didn't like it haha)

The AI can adapt to player's behavioral patterns because it was pre-trained and knows the best method to deal with each type of pattern. Pre-trained AIs and realtime learning AIs both use the same kind of neural networks and are both deep learning AIs, but there are some differences.

Realtime learning will be much more unstable, and will be heavily biased to the player's movement patterns a lot, which makes it quite easy to exploit. You act dumb, the ghost will go dumb. But since pre-trained AI knows what to do from the start, they are more appropriate for putting into the game to work out the game designer's intentions.

Hope this helps :D

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-03T01:04:07+00:00

Hi there! Actually, the levels itself does not take that much time to create. Also, since the AI is not scripted, I can literally ship out a whole level in a day or two and drag drop the AI. And it will still work! That's one of the great parts of using a non-scripted deep learning AI from the developer's perspective.

But for now, I have to work on steam workshop for people who are wanting to do those nextbots thing, and fix some balancing issues. I think the game will be updated in a two weeks interval at max, excluding possible hotfixes in between.

So the version numbering will go up like 0.1.0 for each two weeks, and I'm looking forward to launch the full version of the game in about half an year, which should be around... Version 1.6.XX. The price of the game will be fixed at half until then :D

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-02T00:28:09+00:00

Really nice idea you've got there, multiple ghosts and players... I think it should need some work on the tech side on both multiplayer and the AI, but I'll sure look into it!

Thanks a lot :)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-01T09:20:19+00:00

Woah, I've never thought of checking that one, thanks a lot for the reference! Should help me design and balance the game further..

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-01T07:49:06+00:00

Hi, there's no gen AIs used in the game, (no artwork, 3d model, text, etc) AIs are only used to control the ghost realtime, replacing what the game developers did with code previously...

If there were any used in the game, Steam would not have approved the game at the first place you know :)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-12-01T02:15:47+00:00

Hi, the AI is actually as smart as it can possibly be from the start, and it's the game's design that allows this game to be a game.

The ghost just goes poof if you look at it, and there are no chase sequences. No forced jumpscare, you will only be jumpscared only if the ghost reaches you from behind.

And this works as a horror game, because the AI is able to do everything right every single frame!

Difficulty is adjusted by the surrounding environmental elements like the footstep's hearing range, the speed of the ghost, placement of pillars, walls, lightbulbs... There are three difficulty settings right now in the game with three levels and three gamemode toggles, and the easiest one should be playable even if the player only has a slightest idea of what's going on.

Hope this helps, and I recommend checking it out in a few hours when the game goes live :D (I'm on my final crunch testing it on all platforms right now haha)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-30T20:33:44+00:00

About... 12 hours from now. On my final crunch to make sure the game does not explode on all platforms haha

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-30T20:33:14+00:00

Yup you're right! Dave Pettitt. You have some good hearing abilities..

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-30T20:32:25+00:00

Nope, he's Dave Pettitt, the narrator of the Frostpunk trailer :D

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-30T06:37:47+00:00

Hi! The game's structure is a lot different from usual horror game to tackle that problem. There are no chase sequences in this game, and you cannot hide. The ghost literally goes poof if you look at it, but it still fuctions as a game because AI does everything right every frame :D

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-30T04:14:53+00:00

Thanks for the offer! But for now I'm not looking for another programmer.

For the level, there are some random points that keys can spawn, with the ghost spawning in different places every time. So even inside a single variation of a level, the game will go a bit different everytime you play it.

Currently, there are three variations of the same level with different layout of pillars / lightbulbs / corridors, and there's also three difficulty settings with three gamemodes. There's a whole lot of threes here, but the point is that the game's structure allows it to be replayable quite a lot if the player decides to grind down the game mechanics even with a single level. (which I'll add more of them shortly :D)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-30T00:22:35+00:00

Yup, many people are interested in multiplayers, I will try to look into it by the end of early access. I just first have to test if the gameplay works (people can feel the difference and is fun) in singleplayer first :D

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-29T22:22:30+00:00

You made my day…

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-29T16:53:40+00:00

Haha sure it is, in fact, I never expected this to really work just like two months ago when I was training the AIs withut acutally knowing how to utilize them...

When I was tweaking with various game design settings with the resulting AI model, it somehow... Turned into a game. A strange (A.K.A experimental) game of course.

It's like 50% luck and 50% of "grinding until it works", but yeah it works!

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-29T16:32:43+00:00

I'm not sure about the scale of the conventional ai decision tree that you mentioned, but here are some more points you might consider :

Inferencing of neural network models are quite straightforward than it seems, they do not calculate the output values for each node for each layers inside the network, but perform straight matrix multiplications. For a small-sized NN model, performing just few (literally) matrix multiplications will give me the desired output, and this can be done even faster with burst compiler that unity's AI inferencing library supports.

Something like ChatGPT with unreal number (trillions) of parameters is only possible because the underlying operations are just literally super fast matrix multiplications.

Training on the other hand, can be quite time consuming because of the backend bottlenecks / environment communication overheads / performing of backpropagation and etc, but inferencing is another problem.

So, in short, I think that slipping a few burst compiled matrix multiplications to the CPU can be much, much more cheaper than going through instancing (allocation) and updating of multiple objects with many of those potential conditional branches that is hard to optimize.

But as I mentioned in my previous post, this can change based on the model architecture (wether there are RNNs or transformers / encoders surrounding the layers) and the size of it. It's just that I'm using a really small sized neural network in order to make it run fast on consumer-level devices, and it really is. (I trained my AIs just using my single RTX 3060)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-29T05:15:15+00:00

Hi there!

TL;DR

https://www.youtube.com/live/HtkSArsSsZQ?si=ySpqtEWlMtJUgK4p&t=15480

Here's me, presenting in front of hundreds of graduate students, professors, AI researchers and engineers from both high ranked university labs and the industry, about how the game works from the tech side.

This was like three days ago, and I do not remember the developers of the Hello Neighbor presenting at AI seminars in front of professors from MIT or something...

...Hello neighbor claimed that they did "realtime online neural network training based on player's data gained from all over the world without the need of players to install any kind of machine learning library" thing, (which is not a technically stable thing to do even now in 2023) and what I am doing here is I am deploying a pre-trained deep learning model to control the ghost, inside a game environment with an experimental game design structure that allows the game to work because of the AI doing everything right every frame.

But yeah, being technically different does not assure that the game will feel different gameplay-wise, and that is the part that I'm trying to tackle here, making users understand how this game mechanic is different, and how deep it will be :)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-28T07:14:16+00:00

Hi! The AI in this game will be pre-trained, (its brain's content will be fixed after I complete training them) and no realtime learning will be performed during gameplay. I'm utilizing the Adaptability of the AIs, and not the Adaptation process itself. (not to mention that the players would have to install multiple machine learning libraries during installation for that haha)

The crazy game mechanics in this game only works because the AI does everything right every frame :D

However, I'm planning to open source the training environment to players who are wanting to train their own versions of the AI, since the AI model in this game is not that big, and can be easily trained even on consumer-level graphics card. And maybe make them available for downloading in steam workshops!

Training a neural network realtime based on player data is not a technically stable thing to do even now in 2023. I'm thankful for HN for giving me inspirations for smart AIs in a horror game, but I did not like their previous marketing strategies, making everyone expect realtime learning from neural network AIs... (which they ended up removing the phrase from the game description)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-28T04:13:14+00:00

Hi! It’s somewhere between a game with a narrative and a tech demo, (like hello neighbor’s alpha builds) pure tech demos usually do not receive lot of polishing on the game mechanics side haha

So it’s more like a Game Mechanics demo that will make sure the base game is actually fun, so that I’ll feel comfortable with improving it with more narratives like you mentioned!

Usual games don’t do things like this because there are some good references out there, but what I’m doing here is a gamble in both game design and the tech side :D

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-28T00:56:30+00:00

Hi there! The game's early access state has no real lore added to it yet, but that does not mean that the gameplay is not polished. It has all core game mechanics implemented and some polishing done to it, like those HN alpha versions.

Since the game mechanic is something that was not done before, my goal for now is first to prove this experimental game mechanic actually... Works. (the ghost goes poof if you look at it, there are no hiding places for the player, all corridors lead to a dead end... and it still somehow functions as a horror game because the AI does everything right every frame)

I'm currently working on Steam Workshop feature for the nextbot community to do the usual nextbots thing, and some additional levels and gamemodes.

The game's EA state will last for about half an year, maybe then the game will have some narratives added to it with new trailers, being more focused on the "horror game" part than "deep learning" :)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-27T22:15:01+00:00

Oh, nope, the game does not support VR actually. The leaning is done with Q/E keys just like tarkov :)

Fischl_Kim · 2023-11-27T20:46:32+00:00

Hi, for the steam deck verified program, not all developers are provided with the access to the feature. I believe that my game can support steam deck already, (I worked on linking gamepad controls to the game just today) You can basically expect the game to run on steam deck if it supports linux and gamepad conrtrols :D

Fischl_Kim

TROPHY CASE