Post by unaware-robot in Would you ever use real-time adapting AI in your game?

Viewing post in Would you ever use real-time adapting AI in your game?

For context, I’m a developer working on a game with combat, where the enemies have predictable behaviour: https://unaware-robot.itch.io/rogueblock-working-title

The idea sounds really interesting, and I think it could have potential in the right circumstances. For me personally, some of my favorite games are Hollow knight & Silksong and a big part that I like about those games is learning the enemy attack patterns and finding a strategy to defeat them. I fear that in those kind of games, the enemy adapting to your playstyle could be frustrating and make it feel difficult to “get better” at the game. But there may be different types of games where this adaptive behaviour could work better.

But my main concern is with the practicality of it. A few questions/concerns I have:

for singleplayer games, having to connect to an external server for the enemy AI means that you can’t play offline.
This dependency could cause problems for people with lower internet speeds.
Who will own the server with the model? Do developers set up / manage their own model themselves, or is it a service that you provide and they connect to?
Is this meant to be applicable to specific types of games, or is it meant to be broadly applicable? -if the second, how do you make the model work for vastly different types of combat? (2D vs 3D, shooters vs fighting games, etc)

very interested in hearing your thoughts/answers on these :)

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ahadprogamer10 days ago

Thanks for checking out the project and for the solid feedback—I totally get your point about games like Hollow Knight, where predictable patterns are actually what makes mastering the game satisfying, so adaptive AI definitely isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. To answer your practical questions, since the AI runs through API calls, an offline mode is honestly something I don't have a perfect answer for just yet and am still trying to figure out. For slow networks, the plan is to use a live API connection like WebSockets so data transfers in small, fast chunks rather than one massive payload, though a really bad internet connection will always be a tough hurdle to fully solve. You won't have to manage or host any models yourself; it's a service where you just download a plugin, integrate it into your code, and make API calls while the backend handles the heavy lifting. It's also not locked to any specific genre or just combat—the goal is to make it a general-purpose plugin where you call functions to make it do whatever you need, whether that's walking, talking, or navigating your specific game world. Right now, it operates around a core set of action functions like move, jump, and attack, so you have to code your game's unique mechanics around those existing hooks, but I'm currently working on expanding it to support direct input calls in the future so it can handle complex, custom actions like swimming or shooting natively without you having to code workarounds.

also my servers had some technical problem that made it unable to use some features but its fixed now so it will work thanks for trying the ai.

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unaware-robot10 days ago(+1)

Thanks for the reply! To be honest, even if I thought adaptive AI would be perfect for my game, I would be a bit wary of making a game that is dependent on an external service, because it could suddenly become unplayable if the servers shut down and I would not be able to do anything about it.

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