Truck Stars


Responsibilities

Gameplay & AI Programming, Multiplayer Networking, Optimization, Tools

Project Length

July 2017 – March 2018 (Mobile Release)
May 2018 – July 2018 (Mixer)

Game Description

Truck Stars started as a multiplayer mobile game built in collaboration with Google ATAP. Players controlled monster trucks in competitive, crown-capturing battles viewed in AR. After its mobile release, we also made a version that was playable on Microsoft’s Mixer platform, where stream viewers could become players, thanks to Mixer’s low-latency input. It was a pretty fun little game, and I was focused mostly on gameplay and AI programming for it.

Bot AI

Since this game relied so heavily on having opponents to play with, it was important for us to have bots to play with in case there weren’t enough players.

The game is fairly simple, so there was no need for the bots to be complex, however I’m pretty happy with what I came up with for their implementation. Their behavior was controlled using a simple state machine, but instead of pre-defined transitions between states, each state was periodically scored based on its utility. Then, whichever state has the highest utility becomes the bot’s active state.