Making Demos

So you've got this killer game, and you need a demo mode. There are two main ways to implement a demo mode: You can play the game yourself and record your moves, or you can use an AI player. Recording your own gameplay turns out to be the most common choice. Writing an AI player that can play as good as a human is difficult, and it's hard to tell the AI that it needs to play the game in a "cool" way because it needs to make a good impression on potential buyers. Let's take a brief look at how each of these methods is implemented.

Prerecorded Demos

To record a demo, basically you record the states of all the input devices each cycle as you create the demo, write the data to a file, and then play back the demo as if it were the input of the game. Take a look at Figure 11.13 to see this graphically. The idea is that the game doesn't know whether the input is from the keyboard (input device) or from a file, so it simply plays the game back.

For this to work, you have to have a deterministic game: If you play the game again and do the exact same things, the game creatures will do the exact same things. This means that as well as recording the input devices, you must record the initial random number seed so that the starting state of a recording game is recorded as well as the input. This ensures that the game will play back the exact same way as you recorded it.

The best approach to recording a game is not to sample the input at timed intervals, but at each frame. Hence, if the game is played on a slower or faster computer, the playback data won't get out of synchronization with the game. What I usually do is merge all the input devices into a single record, one for each frame, and then make a file of these records. At the beginning of the file, I place any state information or random numbers that I played the demo with so that these values can be loaded back in. Therefore, the playback file might look something like this:

Initial State Information

Frame 1: Input Values
Frame 2: Input Values
Frame 3: Input Values
.
.
Frame N: Input Values

Once you have the file, simply reset the game and start it back up. Then read the file as if it were the input devices. The game doesn't know the difference!

AI-Controlled Demos

The second method of recording a game is by writing an AI bot to play it, much like people do for Internet games like Quake. The bot plays the game while in demo mode, just like one of the AI characters in the game. The only problem with this method (other than the technical complexity) is that the bot might not necessarily show off all the cool rooms, weapons, and so on, because it doesn't know that it's making a demo. On the other hand, the cool thing about having a bot play is that each demo is different and the "attract mode" of the game will never get boring.

Implementing a bot to play your game is the same as with any other AI character. You basically connect it to the input port of your game and override the normal input stream, as shown in Figure 11.13. Then you write the AI algorithms for the bot and give it some main goals, like finding its way out of the maze, killing everything in sight, or whatever. Then you simply let the bot loose to demonstrate the game until the player wants to play.