Master Thesis for the degree Master of Arts (M.A.) THE USE OF MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHMS IN THE PROCESS OF GAME DEVELOPMENT TO FIND BUGS AND UNWANTED GAME DESIGN FLAWS 21st June, 2021 Julius Hartmann HAW Hamburg Faculty of Design, Media and Information (DMI) Department of Media Technology Matriculation number: 2425905
[email protected] under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Sabine Schumann and Prof. Dr. Stephan Pareigis I Title The use of machine learning algorithms in the process of game development to find bugs and unwanted game design flaws Keywords Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Proximal Policy Opti- mization (PPO), Behavioral Cloning (BC), Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL), Curiosity, Game Development, Game Design, Quality Assurance Abstract The game development process involves many different disciplines, ranging from visual arts, sound design, game design, product management, frontend- and backend development and many more. All of which are contributing to a single project to create the best possible player experience. The player experience can easily be interrupted by bugs or imbalanced game design. For example if a strategy game has many types of buildings, to which one outperforms all others, it will be highly likely that players would use this advantage and adopt a strategy that may reduce the usage of the surrounding buildings. The game would become monotonous instead of diverse and exciting. This work covers exploratory research whether machine learning can be used during the process of game development by having an Artificial Intelligence agent testing the game. Previous studies from other researchers have shown that Reinforcement Learning(RL) agents are capable to play finished games on super human level.