Team Blockhead Wars: Generating FPS Weapons in a Multiplayer Environment

We present an attempt at exploring the search space of weapons in team-based multiplayer First-Person Shooters (FPS). At the foundation of the experiment is Team Blockhead Wars (TBHW), a game that we developed for the purposes of this project. TBHW allows human players to enjoy classic multiplayer FPS gameplay and uses a genetic algorithm to continuously generate new weapons. A weapon’s genome consists of ten real-valued parameters, which together form a vast search space that includes common FPS weapon tropes. The evaluation function scores weapons on the basis of their use by players. The game also generates 3D meshes to visually represent the generated weapons for easy player recognition. While TBHW is work in progress, preliminary results are encouraging.