Games By ANGELINA

Description

Games By Angelina is the home of the ANGELINA project, the PhD work of Michael Cook at Imperial College's Computational Creativity Group. The aim is to develop an AI system that can intelligently design videogames, as part of an investigation into the ways in which software can design creatively.

History

Arcade games

Mike began work on ANGELINA in late 2010, looking at ways of building a system that could procedurally generate not just one part of a game, but all parts. Using an AI technique called computational evolution he built the first iteration of ANGELINA: a small system that generated HTML5 webgames. Two are playable online via ANGELINA's games page: Revenge and After Squad.

Platformers, Flixel and Metroid

In the summer of 2011, after writing up the work on arcade games, Mike began looking at ways he could apply the same ideas to other genres. A new version of ANGELINA was written that designed simple Metroidvania games with powerups that help the player complete the game levels. ANGELINA produced some simple Christmas-themed games, and was commissioned by New Scientist to make Space Station Invaders.

News, Social Awareness and Creativity

In early 2012 Mike began experimenting with other directions for ANGELINA. One area was exploring ideas about computational creativity, by trying to adapt ANGELINA to make games about real-world events. Extensions were made that gave ANGELINA the ability to read news articles, search the web for resources, integrate them into a game and provide simply commentaries on the results. You can play a variety of these games, like The Conservation Of Emily, on ANGELINA's games page.

The Future

Mike is currently working on new ways to get ANGELINA acting even more independently of humans, including new techniques that will let ANGELINA discover and test new game mechanics just by looking at existing game code. Mike and ANGELINA are planning to release in late 2012 to showcase some of the results from this.

Projects

• A Puzzling Present
• Keith