Nicolas Frois - Rumble Rockers

Rumble Rockers is a modern take on classic beat'em ups. The game offers local multiplayer with up to four players, similar to games like Castle Crushers. The game was developed by Abstract Digital Works.

During my time working on Rumble Rockers, my role was to program the artificial intelligence that controls the game's enemies. This work served as my thesis for my degree in Electronic Engineering with a focus on computer science. Therefore, I not only developed the implementation strategies but also included in-depth research on the state of the art of artificial intelligence for video games, and included a complete report on the decisions made.

An interesting design problem:

The algorithm designed for the enemies in this game meets several objectives:

● NPCs make decisions based on the current state of the game.

● NPCs are not just enemies but have their own objectives (and these can be in favor of the players).

● NPCs have a variety of actions available and execute them intelligently.

To solve this complex challenge in an orderly manner, the first thing I did was divide the problem into three stages based on my experience working in robotics during my university career: information gathering, decision-making, and action execution.

Viewing these three pillars separately allowed me to arrive at concrete solutions for each stage:

● Information gathering was solved with an architecture of relevant information sensors.

● Decision-making was solved with an algorithm based on utility theory (the implementation slightly extends its definition and considers some additional scenarios).

● Action execution was solved using behavior trees. This allows high-level decisions to not be interrupted by decisions that should not have the same importance.

The result was a very robust and flexible system, in which the characters behaved in a sufficiently intelligent manner, with different sides, movements and priorities, also allowing the rest of the developers to expand the actions, priorities and sides present in the game.

Previous project

Back to Selected Games

Next project