Botty - Teaching an AI to play BGO! (Patreon)

As most of you have already seen, the Botty Alpha Test is currently live and patrons of the Gobbo tier can add Botty to games that they host. Thank you all so much for being here and supporting us on our adventure to teach an AI to play the wackiest game on the internet! <3

Botty is a handcrafted AI with the potential to understand game mechanics and use that knowledge to play the game. This is something that we've long deemed an impossible feat. Our original approach therefore was to create a bot that would only encounters a small subset of the game that it would understand. It would get its own events and items and otherwise be super dumb. But during development we kept coming up with new ideas and slowly but steadily the dream to create a complete BGO bot began to take hold of us...

Actions & Consequences

Botty initially knows that he has items and skills and that those can be used to do stuff. One by one, we're defining how they can be used (possible actions) and what each action does (consequences). Botty can then predict the outcomes of all his actions, although RNG is hard for Botty. But... how does he know what's a good or bad outcome?

Worth, Cost & Gain

Everything that Botty has (items, skills, effects) has a "worth". This indicates how valuable something is to Botty. His actions can have a "cost", which indicates what Botty gives up to perform that action. For example, using a Lemon costs you a Lemon and using a class skill puts it on cooldown. And finally, an action can lead to a "gain", for example because an enemy player died or because Botty received a positive effect.

What's next?

Botty now has a decent understanding of a good amount of items, but he doesn't understand most effects and needs to learn how most events work.

Botty will also need to learn the following things:
 - Recognize which players are a threat
 - Make a game plan
 - Save items to use later
 - Try to win by using many items and skills together (swooping)
 - Item combos (lasso + hammer, etc)
 - And much more...

We hope you're as excited as we are to see how much Botty can learn! By playing games with Botty you help us out a lot. And your support on Patreon means we can keep spending our time on him. Thank you! <3

Love,
Dys, Sil & Botty