Tower Defense Gaming and Computational Intelligence Part 1 | TD Gaming
Tower defense has actually been used recently in computational intelligence research.
Tower defense games can provide an important testbed for games research, especially in the underrepresented casual games area. This helps create a more interesting interactive way to do research for casual gamers in the area of computational intelligence. Computational intelligence can also be used through research to improve tower defense gaming experiences as well. Procedurally generated content from the experience of doing the research has actually been used to create a new prototype tower defense game.
If you’re familiar with these types of games, you know that they are strategy games that focus on tower placement and utilizing resources in order to defend a base for a certain objective. A series of offensive enemies in waves will attack your base in each time you kill one of these enemies, you’ll get some kind of currency or some kind of resource that can be used to buy new defensive towers and upgrade towers that you own. By building up these resources, and placing them appropriately and effectively, you can survive the waves of enemies that are coming at you. If enough of the bad guys reach the end of the map without being killed however, then they win. The towers that you buy and upgrade usually fire automatically on the opposing forces.
These types of tower defense games cannot only be fun, they can be challenging and addictive as well.
They can be a good way to pass time or keep your brain active. While the gameplay might be simple, the tactics involved might not always be very easy to master. There is a large population of casual tower defense gamers. This is the testbed for the entire computational intelligence research centered around tower defense gaming. These types of strategy games offer a way to study the individual engaged without having the researcher interfere with the test subject. Tower defense games are pretty easy to program and they’re graphically pretty easy to make, so they are also ideal for creating a computer program to help study computational intelligence.
In other words, these types of games are pretty easy to create for research purposes, but they’re still complex enough that they can be used to draw some interesting conclusions in terms of computational intelligence. These new findings can be used to further AI research using tower defense in general.
There are a lot of different elements that tower defense can be used to test. Everything from resource allocation to strategic deployment of assets, to the timing of the creep a.k.a. the enemies in the ways that they travel in, all the way to competitive and cooperative multiplayer and the ability to create procedurally generated content. This provides a great way for tower defense to help with future research and create subgenres and offshoots of popular or traditional tower defense games. This can also help game developers gain the popularity that they are after.
After finding a basic structure for a tower defense game, using computational intelligence research we can identify areas of improvement. New types of levels, towers, and enemies can be tested in this field to create a new tower defense prototype.
continue on Tower Defense Gaming and Computational Intelligence Part 2
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