Post Mortem

I had this idea when I read a heartfelt post that I saw many years ago about someone who cherished their XBOX because it had their father's Save File on it. The save file was a replay of their father's last run around a particular track in the racing game. I was really moved by it and wanted to create a game that "immortalized" you like that.

When I picked up machine learning a few years ago, I identified it as a way to make this happen. So, to develop the game, I started with a car driving around a track. The input data for the neural network was the distance from the central spline, tangent angles, and the preceding and following curvature of the spline. It worked well but I wanted to add different gameplay that was more than just driving around a track. 

In the current iteration, the players are chasing a rabbit around the park and the input data is much simpler than in the first iteration - just the distance and angles. I'm only collecting 15000 data points right now which equates to 5 minutes of game time at Unity's 50 physics ticks per second.

My original idea for the current iteration was for the player to be able to play alongside multiple other data models that may have chosen to do different activities in the park. The goal was to truly capture what a player preferred to do in the game space rather than just how effectively they could chase just one goal. So, there was a track, a rabbit, and a butterfly. 

For each target, I collected different data points. But I wasn't able to make a network that accurately determined what the players originally chose to do i.e. which target they preferred, drive around the track, chase the rabbit, or chase the butterfly because all three data points fight with each for the control of the bike. 

I'm, nonetheless, happy with the current state of the game. I feel it captures the original idea well. I plan to add a feature to allow the player to play alongside multiple "ghosts" so that you can recreate your childhood evenings at the park with all your neighborhood friends.

When I posted about the game to Hacker News, one commenter pointed out that this is what Forza's Drivatars do. I did not know about Drivatars when I started working on this. I was a little disappointed but then, as another commenter pointed out, it just validates that this idea, when implemented in other games, has the potential to offer a unique experience to players in the future.

Since I didn't know how to convey the crux of the game in an elevator pitch, I went through many iterations of how to describe it. I settled on "Forever-Time Multiplayer" because it used something that already existed, the term "real-time multiplayer", and tweaked it enough to give someone an idea of what the underlying mechanic is. I am worried about it seeming presumptuous to create a new name for a mechanic that I wasn't even the first one to implement. However, I'll just keep on calling it that and hope it catches on.