Design and Implementation of a Compiled Declarative Language for Game AI Control

Abstract

Video games have become one of the most popular forms of entertainment around the world. Currently, agents (bots or non-player characters) are predominantly programmed using procedural and deterministic imperative techniques, which pose significant drawbacks in terms of cost and time efficiency. An interesting and alternative line of work is to develop declarative scripting languages which align the programming task closer to human logic. This allows programmers to intuitively implement agents’ behaviors using straightforward rules. In this regard, most of these languages are interpreted, which may impact performance. Hence, this article presents the design and implementation of a new declarative and compiled scripting language called Obelysk for controlling agents. To test and evaluate the language, a video game was created using the Godot game engine, which allowed us to demonstrate the correct functionality of our scripting language to program the AIs participating in the video game. Finally, an analytics platform was also developed to evaluate the correct behavior of the programmed agents.