Is there a reason you are starting from scratch and building a whole new videogame? This seems like a lot of work, and it risks failure for a bunch of mundane reasons (ie, not enough people like the game) even if the AI part works well. For an early minimim-viable-product, why not create an AI that operates within an already popular and easily moddable game? Things like Minecraft or Terraria servers come to mind since they have a focus on building in a voxel-based environment, but I’m sure there are lots of potential games that you could look at.
In other news, I think this is a really interesting and promising way of studying alignment problems and testing out various proposed solutions. Congrats for working on such a cool idea!
I was pretty concerned about this too, but one reason for optimism is they have a very experienced professional game developer on their team, Brandon Reinhart:
Brandon has been a professional game developer since 1998, starting his career at Epic Games with engineering and design on Unreal Tournament and Unreal Engine 1.0. More recently, Brandon spent 12 years at Valve wearing (and inventing) hats. Many, many hats… Brandon has spent considerable amounts of time in development and leadership on Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 where he wrote mountains of code and pioneered modern approaches to game development. Also an advisor for the Makers Fund family of companies, Brandon offers his expertise to game startups at all stages of growth.
Is there a reason you are starting from scratch and building a whole new videogame? This seems like a lot of work, and it risks failure for a bunch of mundane reasons (ie, not enough people like the game) even if the AI part works well. For an early minimim-viable-product, why not create an AI that operates within an already popular and easily moddable game? Things like Minecraft or Terraria servers come to mind since they have a focus on building in a voxel-based environment, but I’m sure there are lots of potential games that you could look at.
In other news, I think this is a really interesting and promising way of studying alignment problems and testing out various proposed solutions. Congrats for working on such a cool idea!
I was pretty concerned about this too, but one reason for optimism is they have a very experienced professional game developer on their team, Brandon Reinhart: