Postmortem: Intelligence Engine Design Systems' “City Conquest” | Hacker News Reader

Postmortem: Intelligence Engine Design Systems' “City Conquest”

gamasutra.com

17 pointspolitician6 comments

"The first [advantage] was our optimization-based approach to the core design. The defensive towers and unit types in City Conquest were not based on arbitrary creative decisions: nearly all of the decisions around their functional aspects were guided by an explicit decision modeling process."

"The second advantage was Evolver, which we discussed in an earlier interview with AIGameDev.com. Evolver was an automated balancing tool based on coevolutionary genetic algorithms. Every night, it would run a huge number of simulated games between red and blue opponents, with each opponent evolving a "population" of scripts (each script being essentially a fixed build order of buildings within the game)."

The good stuff starts on page 2.

I think it's really cool to see this practical use of genetic algorithms.

I've written a few toy systems in the past, and have been told by (at least a few of) my mentors that GAs are a waste of time and can't solve any real problems.

> The good stuff starts on page 2.

FYI, Gamasutra provides a "printer friendly" version that is not paginated:

http://gamasutra.com/view/feature/186088/postmortem_intellig...

From the article:

> a market opportunity for games that combined elements of tower defense games like Kingdom Rush with the depth of real-time strategy games like Star[c]raft

Ironically, the first tower defense games were custom maps in Starcraft. I probably still have my copy of the Art of Defense on a backup drive...

I love Gamasutra's postmortem articles. I wish more software projects would share their lessons learned, helping others avoid the same pitfalls.`

They're also often brutally honest. I read many postmortems of games that failed, either commercially and/or in respect to their original vision, and the postmortem explored the how and why of that more than "what we learned from this and how this will make our next product more awesome". A postmortem is best when it's clinical and conducted under an unblinking neon light, and some of the ones on Gamasutra are truly something to aspire to. They're written by and for developers, they're not marketing, I love that.

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