29
Jul

GECCO16: General Video Game Level Generation

Hello everyone,
This is my talk in GECCO16 for our paper “General Video Game Level Generation“.

GVG-LG Framework GECCO.001

Hello everyone, I am Ahmed Khalifa a PhD student at NYU Tandon’s school of engineering and today I am gonna present my paper General Video Game Level Generation

GVG-LG Framework GECCO.002

We want to design a framework that allows people to develop general level generator for any game described in video game description language.

GVG-LG Framework GECCO.003

So what is level generation? It using computer algorithm to design levels for games. People in industry have been using it since very long time. At the beginning the reason due to technical difficulties but now to provide more content to user and it enables a new type of games. The problem with level generation is all the well known generators are designed for a specific game. So it depends on domain knowledge to make sure levels are as perfect as possible. Doing that for every new game seems a little exhaustive so we wanted to have on single algorithm that can be used on multiple games. In order to do that we need a way to describe the game for the generators.

26
Jul

IJCAI16 Talk: Modifying MCTS for Humanlike Video Game Playing

Hello everyone,
Ages since last post 😀 on Thursday July 14th I gave a talk about my paper “Modifying MCTS for Humanlike Video Game Playing” with Aaron Isaksen, Andy Nealen, and Julian Togelius at IJCAI16. Thanks to Aaron, he captured a video of my talk. Here is it:

Also we did a poster for the conference which looked amazing. Here is the poster:

Humanlike MCTS Poster.001

If the video is not clear, I am posting the slides here with my comments:

Humanlike MCTS New.001

Hello everyone, I am Ahmed Khalifa, PhD student at NYU Tandon’s School of Engineering. Today I am gonna talk about my paper “Modifying MCTS for Humanlike Video Game Playing”.

7
May

Super-W-Hack! Incubator Pitch

Hello everyone,
Today me and Gabriella gave a talk about Super-W-Hack for the incubator program. I felt it would be nice to share the talk with you people.

SuperWHack-Pitch.001 Hello everyone, I am Ahmed and this is Gabriella. We are PhD students at the game innovation lab here at NYU. We are going to talk today about our game Super-W-Hack!

SuperWHack-Pitch.002
Super-W-Hack! is a roguelike game with retro aesthetics as a tribute to the roguelike genre. Our game takes the procedural content generation (PCG) up to the next level. We use it to generate everything in the game.

SuperWHack-Pitch.003
Levels are procedurally generated, names, layouts, enemy distributions.

SuperWHack-Pitch.004
Player weapons: weapon pattern, names, sounds.

9
Oct

Video Game Description Language (VGDL) & General Video Game Playing Framework (GVG-AI)

Hello,
This post is a presentation I did couple of weeks ago at Game Innovation Lab (GIL). It supposes to help people at the lab to understand VGDL and GVG-AI framework. I think that if we want VGDL to evolve, more people should know about it and use it. This evolution won’t happen without showing to people the power of GVG-AI Framework and VGDL. There is lots of development happening to improve the framework and language and making it more accessible to people (creating an Interactive Visual Editor with computer assist). The following paragraphs are my slides with a description for each slide.

26
May

Game Development BootCamp Talk

Hello Everyone,
Sorry for being away still trying to get out of depression but at same time I made a talk for an event called Game Development BootCamp in Egypt in Alexandria (a city on the north coast) I went there with my game developers / designers friends and I enjoyed it because it was really good time to get away from everything and try to get out of depression it helped somehow but I keep going back and back to depression but don’t worry I am getting out from that.

Here a recorded video about the talk (The talk is in Arabic so I will post the slides with English explanation to everything in here as I done with A Maze talk)

18
Nov

A Maze Johannesburg Festival 2013 Presentation

Hey All,
I know I should have posted that article long ago after I return back from Johannesburg, but the truth is I was busy finishing my games and also somehow lazy to post about my presentation I gave there which is called “be Different”.
That version I will be posting here contain more details than the one I presented at A Maze

Slide1 Slide2 Why do we play games? In Egypt if you say that word some will tell you just wasting time although if you told them you can waste it by other activities like reading but they choose to play games cause it makes them happy or change their mood or take their attention or communicating with other people through multiplayer games or just seeking some challenge either via PC or via other Human

All these stuff I said is experience …. people play games to experience feelings and emotions

Slide3

Games is a system of rules and interactions that we can use it to transfer a certain experience from game designers (most of the time) to players so it’s a medium or channel for transferring experience like all other mediums (e.g. books, movies, music …etc).

For example “Aquaria” by Alec Holwaka it wants you to make you feel comfortable enjoy every second exploring the game seeing the result of every action
So it transferred that experience using