VIDEO: THIS AI GAME DOES NOT PLAY THE GAME, INSTEAD IT BUILDS THE GAME

You first have to understand how AI researcher, Mike Cook, spends his time, it might be able to help if you played the same first, which can be accessed here.

In the game, Mike Cook – a senior researcher at the University of Falmouth – started with a partially finished concept. It involved the player directing an adventure around a dungeon, killing skeletons to reach the exit. Mike did not finish developing the game though, credit for that goes to the automated computer engine Mike built, which develops games on its own.

The system is called ANGELINA, a slightly tongue-in-cheek acronym for "A Novel Game-Evolving Labrat". The short version of what happened is ANGELINA took Mike's initial idea and ran with it. And in the process of designing levels for the game, it also completely changed the game's purpose.

Instead of the player controlling a single adventurer who kills skeletons to reach the exit, ANGELINA designed things so that you would have to sacrifice some of the multiple adventures in each level in order to allow the rest to escape safely. “It was a really clever piece of level design,” Mike enthuses about the game he calls “Before Venturing Forth.”

“I’ve broken down the game design process into different tasks, like designing levels, inventing rules, or testing difficulty. ANGELINA selects tasks based on what it’s current game is missing, and then uses techniques like computational evolution to perform each task. Right now it has to rely on my opinions for some things – for example, I tell it that levels which take longer to solve must be better. Hopefully, in the future, I can make it more independent so it can throw away these ideas and develop new opinions on what makes a level good or a game fun.”

Here is a play-through of the game: