Home About EIS →

Author Archives: Ben Weber

From Concept to Game in 48 hours: Global Game Jam 2011

This past weekend I participated in Global Game Jam 2011, an international event in which small groups of game development enthusiasts attempt to build a game in 48 hours. It provides an opportunity for people who love games to share in their passion of making games. This year the event was a huge success, with 6500 […]

Posted in Academics | Comments closed

StarCraft Competition Postmortem with Alex Champandard

Alex and I will be discussing the current state of RTS research and the StarCraft AI Competition today at 13:00 PST. http://aigamedev.com

Posted in Academics | Comments closed

Man vs Bot

A lot of interesting bots were submitted to the StarCraft AI Competition. However, even the best could not beat an expert human player. But what about amateur players? Kotaku claimed that most casual StarCraft players would be unable to defeat the bots. The goal of this post is to test that claim. To do so, I played against […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

StarCraft AI Competition Results

The AIIDE 2010 StarCraft AI Competition has come to a close. The challenge given to competitors was to build the best performing bot for an immensely popular, commercial game. The competition consisted of four tournaments of varying complexity. This was the first year the competition was held and it turned out to be a success. Even though no […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments closed

Infinite Adaptive Mario

Recently, there has been increased interest in building games that dynamically adapt to players. One of the common approaches to building adaptive games is dynamic difficulty adjustment. However, most of these approaches are limited to parameter tweaking such as adjusting weapon strength or reducing spawning times, and do not modify levels in response to difficulty […]

Posted in Academics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

A Probabilistic Multi-Pass Level Generator

I recently participated in the CIG 2010 Mario level generation competition. My submission utilizes a multi-pass approach to level generation in which the system iterates through the level several times, placing different types of objects during each pass. During each pass through the level, a subset of each object type has a specific probability of […]

Posted in Academics | Comments closed