AI Social Deduction: Proposal

Project Summary

For my 10 week Programming 3 Personal Project, I will be creating an Among Us-like social deduction in Unreal and then create AI NPCs to play the game and face off against each other. The goal of this project is to take a deep dive into the aspects of AI being able to observe their surroundings, communicating between each other, remembering what they’ve learned, and changing their behavior based on what they know.

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Weekly Breakdown

• Week 1: Research
  • ​Research how AI observe scene elements in Unreal and what details the NPCs should be memorizing.
  • Implement a basic map to begin testing the NPCs in.
• ​Week 2: NPCs
  • ​NPC Randomized movement towards goals. (try to get them to meander around similar to how a human player would)
  • Randomize the killer amongst the NPCs. (may be cut for scope's sake and to make it easier to know who are the killers each round)
  • Main Menu
• ​Week 3: NPC Gameplay
  • ​Continue NPC movement.
  • NPC Killing
  • NPC Tasks
• ​Week 4: Victories
  • ​Task win and Killer win conditions
  • End simulation screen
  • Begin observation implementation.
• ​Weeks 5 and 6: NPC Observation
  • ​Implement Observation and Recording Observations for the NPCs. (begin with a simple implementation then build up more complex details)
  • Work on visually displaying what NPCs learn and know, and provide the user ways to check these details.
• ​​Weeks 7 and 8: NPC Dialogue
  • ​Create basic discussion scene.
  • Work on NPCs typing out dialogue between each other in voting scene and recording observations learned from dialogue.
  • Continue to work on visually displaying what NPCs know.
• ​Weeks 9 and 10: Voting and Wrap-up
  • ​NPC voting scene and voting victory
  • Expanding on AI reasoning if able to
  • Bug fixing

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Visualization of Data

To help with debugging and showing observers what is being witnessed and learned in the simulation, these elements will be implemented to provide visualization of data:

• A text box at the bottom left of the screen to give short updates on what has happens when they happen in the game
• Buttons to click on to focus on a specific NPC and reveal what they "know".
  • Show a text list of what the focused NPC has seen and at what time stamp
  • Show the radius of vision for the NPC
    

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Risks

• Mitigated
  • ​Trying to get the NPCs to play the real Among Us game - This was dealt with by me deciding to create my own simple game similar to Among Us.
  • Trying to get the NPCs to play against human players - No humans will be needed to play against my NPCs in this game I make. This could be a stretch goal, but that's unlikely due to the amount of commands needed to be provided to a human player to deal getting information from NPCs being too many.
• ​Still Possible
  • ​Game setup takes longer than expected - Ways to resolve this involve dropping randomization of the killers, removing the emergency button, using online art assets, and removing the recent events text box.
  • Dialogue between NPCs difficult to create - To reduce the time on this, the dialogue can be made simple and repetitive. Could also be made to be always true and always taken as fact by the NPCs. (Ex: Red says Green killed Blue, then the NPCs all instantly know Green is the killer.)
    

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Full Powerpoint

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