EvolvingBehavior: Towards Co-Creative Evolution of Behavior Trees for Game NPCs

Abstract

To assist game developers in crafting game NPCs, we present EvolvingBehavior, a novel tool for genetic programming to evolve behavior trees in Unreal®Engine 4. In an initial evaluation, we compare evolved behavior to hand-crafted trees designed by our researchers, and to randomly-grown trees, in a 3D survival game. We find that EvolvingBehavior is capable of producing behavior approaching the designer’s goals in this context. Finally, we discuss implications and future avenues of exploration for co-creative game AI design tools, as well as challenges and difficulties in behavior tree evolution.