Contest: Ultimate Challenge

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Sat May 03, 2014 5:09 pm

Do they gain points? They could observe that when the ball touches the blocks and breaks them it gives points, and that's the incentive to keep the ball in play. Them touching the joystick could give off that they are in control of a paddle. If all that there is happens to be the paddle, the blocks, and the ball, no sounds or points or anything, they could observe that the game stops once the ball is gone, and would want to continue to keep it in play, and breaking the blocks seems to do something, so they may as well aim to break them while keeping the ball in play. The desire could just be to keep one session going as long as they can muster.

Post by **TMC** » Mon May 05, 2014 12:11 pm

Willy Elektrix wrote:I would like to watch the Atari Player for the whole 2 hours to observe the process by which is learns the game and see how it differs from how a human would.

It seems to be surprisingly difficult to find any videos of it. But according to graphs in the paper it improves quite steadily.

Willy Elektrix wrote:What I don't understand, is how these players understand the goals of the game. For instance, how does the Atari Breakout Player know that it should break the blocks instead of just keeping the ball in play, or just letting the game quit to title screen.

I read most of both papers. Meow is right, the Atari AI player is also told whether its score increased or decreased (not by how much) at each frame of the game.
LearnFun/PlayFun on the other hand has to work out for itself what it should be doing, based on watching a human play for a minute or so. It's assumed that the human is making progress in the game, and there's no negative training signal. One thing it seems to learn is that the game ending is a bad thing, I assume because the title screen is the initial hence worst state of the human play example.

Also, my bad, I failed to link the better mario AI contest entrants one, two.

Anyway, I decided not to do some insane bullet-hell platformer, since I'm not good at that game. Got some inspiration from DOS classics like Kroz and nailed down a concept well enough to actually begin.

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Mon May 05, 2014 2:41 pm

Two weeks to go. Can Meowskivich get all the levels needed done? We'll see. This is the final week of school, exams done by thursday, and any late work due by friday. So you'll probably see teasers from Meowskivich the following week as he gets one or two levels done every day or so.

I hope you like pipe mazes...

Willy Elektrix · Post by **Willy Elektrix** » Mon May 05, 2014 11:49 pm

Meowskivich wrote:Two weeks to go. Can Meowskivich get all the levels needed done? We'll see. This is the final week of school, exams done by thursday, and any late work due by friday. So you'll probably see teasers from Meowskivich the following week as he gets one or two levels done every day or so.

I hope you like pipe mazes...

I have no idea what to expect from you.

TMC wrote:Anyway, I decided not to do some insane bullet-hell platformer, since I'm not good at that game. Got some inspiration from DOS classics like Kroz and nailed down a concept well enough to actually begin.

Excellent! Kroz is a great inspiration.

RMSephy · Post by **RMSephy** » Tue May 06, 2014 1:11 am

So anyways, in RMSephy news, after I said I would make a game for this contest Dark Souls 2 came out and I got addicted to that for a week or so, and didn't even get started on my game. But I'm proud to say that I finally beat Dark Souls 2 and therefore can now start working on my game!

Not sure how much of it I can actually get done, but we can hope.

Willy Elektrix · Post by **Willy Elektrix** » Wed May 07, 2014 1:00 am

RMSephy wrote:So anyways, in RMSephy news, after I said I would make a game for this contest Dark Souls 2 came out and I got addicted to that for a week or so, and didn't even get started on my game. But I'm proud to say that I finally beat Dark Souls 2 and therefore can now start working on my game! Not sure how much of it I can actually get done, but we can hope.

I'm not sure what to make of that tantalizing screenshot, but I'm glad you are participating.

Post by **TMC** » Wed May 07, 2014 7:08 am

I'm going to reveal that my main influence is Mutant Warzone. From the author of STAR QUEST. But Robot never uploaded a version that included the OST he and mrjordak created for it. And mrjordak marked all tracks on Youtube private :(

By this point I've put a LOT of work into the design doc. Probably saved myself a huge amount of time in the process. Interesting how initially the idea didn't seem all that appealling in my head, but with a lot of (obsessive) thought interesting ideas slowly accreted.

I briefly considered making the game in MegaZeux; now I'm programming it from scratch. I really hope it turns out as planned.

Willy Elektrix · Post by **Willy Elektrix** » Wed May 07, 2014 11:52 pm

TMC wrote:I'm going to reveal that my main influence is Mutant Warzone. From the author of STAR QUEST. But Robot never uploaded a version that included the OST he and mrjordak created for it. And mrjordak marked all tracks on Youtube private

I haven't played any of Robot's ZZT or MegaZeux games, but I read his blog occasionally. Mutant Warzone always looked interesting. It's a damn shame he never made anything else in OHR besides Star Quest.

Post by **TMC** » Thu May 08, 2014 4:12 am

Yes, pity he lost steam after his most recent OHR game file was corrupted. (I wonder whether James concluded anything from that. I see he was once working on a game called Skeletronic as well.

Post by **Bob the Hamster** » Thu May 08, 2014 2:33 pm

TMC wrote:Yes, pity he lost steam after his most recent OHR game file was corrupted. (I wonder whether James concluded anything from that. I see he was once working on a game called Skeletronic as well.

I had forgotten about this. I looked back in my e-mail, and in 2012, Robot sent me a corrupted rpg file,

Myself, speaking to Robot wrote: I checked out the file, and I am very sorry to say that I can't save any
of it :(

I unlumped the file, and it was missing most of its lumps. When I
examined the lumps that were there, I found that only the filenames had
been preserved, and the contents of the data lumps had been overwritten
with zeroes, and occasional patches of apparently random bytes.

Have you had a hard drive failure, or have you had any other files on
your computer get corrupted besides advent3.rpg?

I am very sorry that I don't have any good news :(

Unfortunately I never got any reply from Robot, so I don't know if a hard drive crash was involved or not.

EDIT: also, I know that Robot had been using version ysiliform+3 20101108 at the time.

Willy Elektrix · Post by **Willy Elektrix** » Thu May 08, 2014 11:49 pm

Ramble Planet was totally inspired by Star Quest (and even includes a hidden Star Quest easter egg). I posted a comment on his blog suggesting he give Ramble Planet and try, but I never heard back.

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Fri May 09, 2014 6:48 pm

10 days to go, and...uh, my flashdrive with my game is missing. I'm sure it's around here somewhere, but this may throw a wrench in my plans. Oh well. I'm busy today still, but should be freeish afterwards, so I hope I can discover the location of the drive so that I may work on the game this following week.

Willy Elektrix · Post by **Willy Elektrix** » Tue May 13, 2014 1:40 am

The contest ends in a week. I hope everyone is working hard!

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Tue May 13, 2014 5:11 am

Willy Elektrix wrote:The contest ends in a week. I hope everyone is working hard!

/proceeds to be unwinding from a certainly grey-hair inducing previous week

I just wonder who all will even submit for this contest. I'll still do something for it. That sounds like I'm giving up, not the case.
Uh, before I confuse anyone further, WHO WILL DARE CONTEST ME IN THIS...contest...
Surely, Meowskivich will be the victor of ultimate challenge.

Meowskivich · Post by **Meowskivich** » Thu May 15, 2014 5:46 pm

only 4ish days left!
So when exactly is the deadline? It's on the 19th, but does that mean we need to have game in BY the 19th or ON the 19th?
In either case, I've been working on a level wittle by wittle.