Roblox Westworld - First playable multi-agent simulation on Roblox
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Project Westworld, is an interactive simulation in Roblox that contains autonomous agents powered by our GAME framework. It is inspired by Westworld, a town inhabited by AI androids. In the Wild West, the player is dropped into the world where a hidden villain, The Bandit, lurks with the aim of seeking power and sowing chaos. The player’s goal is to identify The Bandit and influence the other agents to capture them.
Agent Autonomy
There are 10 agents inhabiting Westworld - each one with their own unique personalities, desires and goals.
Personality
Take Ignacio Morales as an example - he is a raider who has faced betrayal in his past and now channels his hurt into seeking control, power, and wealth through ruthless and chaotic means. This backstory along with Ignacio’s goal of causing maximum chaos and robbing the rich has been added into his “personality” in the form of a character card.
Autonomy
Ignacio’s personality, along with several other variables such as the game state, his previous actions, and long term memory, is fed into the high level task planner. This generates a high-level task for him, which is then fed into the action planner and executor which is used to create a seqeunce of granular actions that are grounded and executable in the environment for Ignacio to take in the game. He also receives in-game feedback in the form of observations, rewards, successes and more which is used to inform and update his plans and following actions.
Having an autonomous character that has goals and strategises how to achieve these in an agentic manner greatly enhances NPCs in games today. Where a standard bot only has fixed paths and options, an autonomous agent is able to take input from its environment, other agents and surrounding player’s to independently develop plans and its actions in the world. This creates more immersive experiences as the agent becomes more unpredictable and humanlike.
Environment Interaction
Agents in the game are also able to interact with the game environment - they can store/remove items in their inventory, they can use the items (e.g. throw a knife) and interact with objects in the environment (e.g. unlock a safe). Developers can utilise this ability to add more items in the action space which increases the storyline diversity.
Infinite Replayability
We find that introducing autonomous agents as NPCs result in more diverse storylines and outcomes in the same game compared to using standard NPCs. The more agents we introduce in the world, the more complex the interactions become and unexpected situations occur, with low repetition across multiple playthroughs. This results in the game essentially being an infinitely replayable world.
Autonomous agents create diverse storylines in a world with every playthrough.
