Unsuccessfully training AI to play my favorite childhood game nobody ever heard of

Here’s my take on teaching AI to play a video game, with the fun twist that this time nobody ever heard of it. DDNet (aka Teeworlds) is an open source retro multiplayer platformer with different game modes like pvp and race modes. Players can walk, jump, use grappling hook and various weapons. In this project, I focused on solo race mode.

For the algorithm I chose PPO, but tried various reward shaping methods that I found interesting/promising, such as Go-Explore.

I worked on this project for around a month, and I’m now at a point where I definitely need a break from it. I decided that this was a good opportunity to write about what I’ve done in a blog post:

https://boesch.dev/posts/ddnet-rl/

I would love to hear your opinions on the project to see if I missed anything super obvious I could try next.