Swarm RTS TD Game

Closed Games Engineering Bachelor Master Project Thesis Games Research Lab

Background

Insects have considerable more mass than humans on our planet. They have evolved far longer than us, too. Social insects are famous for achieving outstanding things by coordinating their work, e.g. building bridges, carrying large objects, or building large nests under ground or up in the trees. To this end, they communicate “stigmergically” which means that they might drop chemical cues along the way, mix them into their construction material or simply emit them from their bodies, they also change the built environment and create stigmeric cues, e.g. by adding mud pellets here or there, or by crafting honey combs etc. Long story short, they control themselves and others by enriching the environment with according instructional information.

Tasks

In this work, you will build on a previously engineered approach to control virtual, terrain-shaping swarms of pellet-dropping agents. The given control mechanics, which work based on configurable beacons placed in 3D, will provide a starting point for an RPG tower defense game. In particular, the player is meant to control swarms of flying agents that build defense “towers” that block and destroy intruding ground troups. The towers will emerge from the interplay of built templates that can direct the construction efforts in certain directions and distance, which can be placed by the player or the agents themselves, as well as from the provision of construction materials that have specific shielding properties or ensure that several “combs” or “pellets” next to each other are joined to form “emitting” surfaces (i.e. guns).

In the end, the construction processes as well as the material logistics have to be either instructed by the player, or swarm agents have to be deployed/possibly also designed by the player which perform these tasks (semi-)autonomously. Management of material, agent types, and, especially, instructions of swarm agents to build effective and strategically sound towers will be the main challenges of the game. The implementation of according step-by-step introductory levels at first and well-balanced advanced levels as well as efficient user interface designs are expected.

I envision a rather simple voxel-style to represent constructions, swarm agents and enemy troups, and simple self-organised rules combined with predefined waypoints for the enemies (as is typically the case in TD games) to keep things simple and scalable. But of course there is a huge degree of creative freedom in this project.

Contact Persons at the University Würzburg

References

[“Truman, S., Seitz, J., & von Mammen, S. (2021). Stigmergic, Diegetic Guidance of Swarm Construction. In International Workshop on Self-Organised Construction (SOCO), Proceedings of the ACSOS Conference. IEEE.”, “von Mammen, S., & Jacob, C. (2008, July). Evolutionary swarm design of architectural idea models. In Proceedings of the 10th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (pp. 143-150).”]