The geometry friends game AI competition

Abstract

This paper describes a new game AI competition that engages participants in the creation of agents for a cooperative platform puzzle game. The agents face the challenge of acting in a dynamic environment, with friction and gravity, as they coordinate actions to solve cooperative puzzles. Hence, agents need to devise cooperative plans to solve the puzzles in the most efficient way and to coordinate their actions to perform joint actions in real-time. The core of the competition is the cooperative track that requires the development of two distinct agents, but we also include a single player track for participants that want to craft the basic skills of the agent without the complexity of cooperation. In particular, to cope with understanding the topology of a level in order to define a plan for solving the puzzle or to define mechanisms to act well in the physics-based game environment. We present the results of the 2014 competition held at IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games, in Dortmund, and discuss some future directions of research.