A Simplified API for the Creation of Bots for Real Time Strategy Games

Artificial Intelligence research in the past few years has been increasingly focusing on games, with Real Time Strategy games being of particular interest. However, one of the main tools used in the creation of agents in these environments has quite a steep learning curve for entry into development, leading to some potential entry barriers that new AI developers have to overcome to get into the field.

This project aims to investigate ways in which these entry barriers can be lowered. Particular interest is taken in the potential future application of techniques found in Visual Programming Languages. With this view, a library of tools to help new AI developers is created and tested before being given to members of the Bot Development community to provide their technical assessment feedback, and has been given to new developers with no previous experience with the subject area for their evaluation on how effective these tools were in easing the process of starting out with development.

This report describes the research, the planning and testing of this library, and the conclusions drawn from the subsequent evaluation of the tools.