Let machine help you with your game
If you ask some guys from the industry about an AI they will tell you about complex behaviour trees or smth similar to control enemies in…
If you ask some guys from the industry about an AI they will tell you about complex behaviour trees or smth similar to control enemies in some PvP/PvE game. In other media, Machine Learning and AI is now perceived as some sort of black (or not) magic which is in charge of Skynet, photo filters in apps like Prisma and etc. In fact, machine learning, neural networks and other ways to analyze data now have extremely low entry threshold, so let’s try to figure out how we are able to use them today in our game projects.
The reason why I’m writing this small article is simple, may it will help some awesome game developers (like you) to find something new and interesting for their games. I’m sure you’ve heard about machine learning, deep learning and other crazy kinds of learning umpteen number of times. But there aren’t so many stories about using them in game development. So let’s make a kind of little introduction with today’s “plug and play” stuff for game developers.
Analytics
I think everything is ok with it right now. E.g. let’s make a neural network to analyse daily sessions of our dear players and predict when is the best time to show special personalised offer about purchasing new shiny green-dragon-armor-set only for 2.99$.
Content production
Awesome idea, let’s replace our buddy 2D artist with a neural network, we’ll give art references to the input and will receive concept arts on the output in 10 minutes. Why not? I’m able to take a photo of my breakfast and apply to its style of Pablo Picasso, it’s one tap on my smartphone. Let’s change Pablo Picasso to the style of Limbo and change source photo to a screenshot of Civilization. Little scary ha? To tell you the truth, every time when I was so enthusiastic to demonstrate machines power to my colleagues with this approach — result was often terrible. Maybe if next time I try to use it to impress 2d texture artist my impression mission will be accomplished :) Anyway, this is only a matter of time, creating 3D or 2D content after learning machines on tons of examples is definitely a solvable problem.
Or may be you’re interested in upscaling your old small textures for the modern 4K display? No problems:
In-game actions
This one is most interesting here just because it’s not so popular and not so clear today how to use machine learning right inside the gameplay. After one issue of Voices of VR podcast with IBM’s Interactive Media CTO George Dolbier I found that there is “plug&play” Unity plugin for IBM Watson Cloud. Investigation results were interesting, may be some functions of this system are useful, possible applications some of them are hard to imagine. So all next stuff is ready for use if you develop your game with Unity engine.
watson-developer-cloud/unity-sdk
unity-sdk - :construction: Unity SDK to use the IBM Watson services.github.com
Feel free to try any of the next features right in your browser by visiting web demos with url like this: https://text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net/.
A. Text-To-Speech
If you asked me if it is good to use generated speech for a game project after the development of InMind VR my answer was — “Sure, it’s cool. I’m just making full re-sound of the project with 30 seconds and one script”.
If you asked me the same after the release of InCell VR my answer would be — “Be very careful, use it only in development or if you have no chance to make a real voice actor”.
The reason for changing my opinion is simple — if you have an extremely little amount of voice in your game it’s ok. Buy if you have 20+ voice phrases it’s very annoying for players (with 2016 technology of course).
WaveNet developed by DeepMind showing one of the best quality of generated speech in the end of 2016. Unfortunately it’s not ready for free usage right now.
WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio | DeepMind
This post presents WaveNet, a deep generative model of raw audio waveforms. We show that WaveNets are able to generate…deepmind.com
Text to Speech
The Text to Speech service understands text and natural language to generate synthesized audio output complete with…text-to-speech-demo.mybluemix.net
B. Analyze of text and text generation
This is the way to extract emotions, social tendencies and writing style from the text. So if you’re brave enough to develop a game which requires a player to input text — it’s may be interesting for you. Also if you want to base your gameplay on dialog with a machine — it’s also an interesting point to start.
ryankiros/neural-storyteller
neural-storyteller - A recurrent neural network for generating little stories about imagesgithub.com
In any case you are able to use this tool to better understand reader’s/writer’s perception. Is it good idea to analyze 10 millions of comments on YouTube videos about e.g. spaceships to better understand the audience? Yes, it’s good, we’re using it in Luden.io. Or, for example let’s take the store description of Clash of Clans and analyze it.
Tone Analyzer
The Tone Analyzer Service analyzes text at the document level and the sentence level. Use the document level analysis…tone-analyzer-demo.mybluemix.net
C. Personality Insights
Amazing one. If you are into movies about FBI agents and detectives it’s for you. The service uses linguistic analytics to infer individuals’ intrinsic personality characteristics, including Big Five, Needs, and Values, from digital communications such as email, text messages, tweets, and forum posts. The service can automatically infer, from potentially noisy social media, portraits of individuals that reflect their personality characteristics. You are able to extract all this information from any open data or (dangerous way) from player’s data e.g. if you know player’s facebook profile link. You’re able to try it just in few click right inside the browser.
Personality Insights
Gain insight into how and why people think, act, and feel the way they do. This service applies linguistic analytics…personality-insights-livedemo.mybluemix.net
Why not to use this tool to analyze some famous person of your game’s audience, publisher’s decision maker or popular YouTube/Twitch person?
D. TradeOff
The Tradeoff Analytics service helps make mathematically right decisions when faced with multiple, sometimes conflicting, goals and alternatives. So we are able to use it as we want. What about the game with an assistant who helps a player choose from zillions upgrades the right ones. What, you want to conflict with a machine? Ok. Maybe game where a player competing with AI with making decisions via selection one of several options. A game like Dictator. So the AI one is making decisions only as machine learning and player is making decisions based on common sense or any strategy he wants. I think any game developer will find some interesting things with this possibility of making very hard decisions by machine.
Tradeoff Analytics
Take your decision-making to the next level with the Tradeoff Analytics user interface! Using a guided decision process…tradeoff-analytics-demo.mybluemix.net
Takeaway
So, guys, that was a first look at using “plug&play” machine learning for our Unity games today. I think in 1–2 years we’ll see tons of new tech symbiote machine learning and game development. It’s always been clear for us — young and brave indie developers are so perfect guys for being first who combine incompatible things. The innovations are moving to industry very often via zillions of indie’s experiments so why no to start thinking about machine learning and game development?
P.S. Always remember that results may surprise you :)
Links
Luden.io
Luden.io was initially started as a Research and Development group at Nival. Nival's track record includes best-selling…luden.io
AE - Medium
In recent years, there has been an explosion of research and experiments that deal with Creativity and A.I. Almost…medium.com
watson-developer-cloud/unity-sdk
unity-sdk - :construction: Unity SDK to use the IBM Watson services.github.com
nucl.ai | Artificial Intelligence in Creative Industries.
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