MarioGPT Uses AI to Generate Endless Super Mario Levels for Free

https://www.slashgear.com/1199870/mariogpt-uses-ai-to-generate-endless-super-mario-levels-for-free/

by Mxbonn • 3 years ago

161 51 3 years ago

This is neat and all, but procedural 2D level generation can be done really well just with simple heuristics, see Spelunky from 2008. And that can be built into the game and computed efficiently on the fly, not requiring an internet connection.

codetiger2• 3 years ago

Came here to post the same thing. Procedural level generation has been there for a while and it does not need advanced AI. Probably if the same thing was done for games like Call of Duty or Medal of Honour type games, it would be more impressive.

dpflan• 3 years ago

And cheaper (compared to the upfront cost to get to the point of GPT doing this versus classic methods).

mtlmtlmtlmtl3• 3 years ago

Minecraft is a notable example of 3D procedural generation. It's so much more complicated than Spelunky though. But definitely impressive.

taeric• 3 years ago

Isn't that the secret, though? Sufficiently advanced procedurally generated content is indistinguishable from AI.

Wowfunhappy2• 3 years ago

Isn't Spelunky rearranging level pieces which were designed by a human? I imagine if you played it long enough, you'd start to recognize the pieces.

mtlmtlmtlmtl3• 3 years ago

Effectively, yes. Although a lot of additional things are also randomized like item/enemy spawns.

Then for Spelunky 2 there's the randomizer mod which randomizes almost everything. It pretty much never ceases to surprise you. Look up spelunky 2 randomizer on Youtube to see for yourself.

sh4rks• 3 years ago

A lot of roguelikes (e.g. Dcss) do this as well. I'd be interested to see a game with truly random procedurally generated levels, though the levels may end up being repetitive and mundane.

astrospective• 3 years ago

While it does arrange prebuilt blocks it also does more, it will punch holes in the walls as needed and does procedural population of what's in each block. The second one takes things further.

jezzamon• 3 years ago

Yes, you do. Each piece has randomness within the piece too, so even then it's not all the same.

Being able to learn how the level generation works as a player is part of the experience of playing a roguelike game, so I don't think that's a bad thing though! Games with too much randomness and not enough structure can feel a bit samey

Larrikin• 3 years ago

I assume this is why Angry Birds 2 is such a terrible game compared to previous incarnations. All the levels get a base then a random generation of enemies. I wonder if it's actually possible to beat all incarnations, as many times I will get to a level, lose all my hearts a few hours or days in a row then easily complete the level without really learning any tricks or strategy.

It has served as a good example to teach kids in my life about the scam of digital artificial scarcity employed by the game by making you wait for hearts or pay.

hotpotamus• 3 years ago

The first game I played and was aware that it was procedurally generated, though I would not have known that term as a child, was the first Diablo, and a quick search shows that it was already a well-established concept by then, going back to the late 70's/early 80's.

a13o7• 3 years ago

The secret to Mario games is a new gimmick introduced every level. They've gotten better at this over the years, and Mario 1 + Lost Levels is the worst example of it. That makes it a great comp for GPT-3 which can churn out an endless supply of flavorless brick & pipe levels and still feel vaguely Mario 1. Were this tool to live up to the hype of "indies punching above their weight", it would need to design novel platformer mechanics. The work it's doing isn't the hard part of platformer level design.

For another example of why this isn't commercially viable, look at what happened with Super Mario Maker. In that game _humans_ are given a fixed set of Mario doodads with which to build levels. But Nintendo kept the secret sauce for themselves - the ability to create new doodads. What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game. Even if you trained MarioGPT on the rich set of level data available in Mario Maker, you would not have an algorithm that makes commercially viable Mario levels.

asddubs• 3 years ago

mario maker had lots of levels combining the different mechanics in new and unforeseen ways, and even using glitches to create new mechanics.

kibwen• 3 years ago

What follows is millions of derivative Mario levels unworthy of their own game.

It doesn't refute your point, but what actually happened was that brilliant tinkerers found ingenious ways to combine the basic tools to create whole new classes of advanced gadgets that enable styles of gameplay not intended by Nintendo. Here's a playlist with some examples and tutorials: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLekbcfvMB1gYieKXixxXVBTYC...

levesque2• 3 years ago

Yeah OP missed the target on this one. Super Mario Maker is a great example of insane creativity demonstrated by a community. AI can't do that though.

tialaramex• 3 years ago

While obviously it'd be more freedom to be allowed to do just whatever you want, artistically it helps to have some sort of constraint. "I can do anything" is a bit... vague. OK, but what should I do? If you give me six specific lego bricks I'm constrained, but immediately I have ideas, and if you think "Six lego bricks means maximum 6 factorial ideas" you're badly mistaken.

If you train MarioGPT on MM2 levels, the reason you don't get "commercially viable Mario levels" is that's not what the community ever wanted to build, it's like training a model on abstract portraiture and then complaining this doesn't produce saleable landscape paintings. Mario Maker has multiple communities, let's look at two of them, in both cases they are not "commercially viable" for whatever that's worth.

Kaizo. Kaizo means roughly "re-arrange" in Japanese but eventually Kaizo Mario is a style in which tremendous skill is needed to navigate the course. Basic Kaizo techniques include the "Shell jump" in which Mario throws a shell, it bounces off a wall or other surface, and Mario jumps off the shell he threw. Mario can of course arrange to throw, jump off, and catch shells more than once, and he can cause Yoshi to swallow and then spit out a shell, jump off that shell, and catch it. Good Kaizo players think nothing of a multi shell jump to climb a wall, they'll assume that if there's a shell and a wall that's what is intended.

Kaizo Mario is far too difficult to be commercially successful. Most people could learn, if they're got good hand-eye co-ordination, but it's not easy and most people would only ever be passably good at it, so that hard Kaizo levels might be impossible either because they didn't figure out the technique or because their skills are inadequate, very frustrating.

"Chocolate" Kaizo (which is Kaizo where you also change the game's rules) isn't possible with Mario Maker, but even if an AI were able to make the best Chocolate Kaizo levels, they're not commercial, the best Chocolate Kaizo today is probably something like "Grand Pooh World 2" but there are maybe a few hundred people in the world who have fun playing something like that, so where's the money?

OK, next community, Troll. Troll Mario subverts the assumptions about the central concept of Mario. The idea is to surprise and perhaps frustrate the player, unlike Kaizo great skill is not mandatory, but patience is, and you need to be able to accept that you were wrong and learn from mistakes which many people struggle to do. A Troll level might present Mario with two apparent routes forward, a mushroom power up with a door, or a fire flower and a pipe. Except nope, those are both instant death, the correct solution is to jump into the obviously deadly pit, it wasn't really deadly and Mario gets a different mushroom then is pushed into a one-shot teleport.

A common Troll trope is the "anti-softlock" complete with use of the "Slide theme" music. Nintendo's levels are designed so that either Mario can win or you will be put out of your misery quickly to try again. Where it's possible to instead get stuck, unable to die, that's called a "Soft lock" - as opposed to a hard lock where the game just freezes. The anti-softlock then is the art of a Troll level making it possible but very difficult to die, even though Mario can't win. Fashion changes, sometimes it's popular to have actual softlocks, sometimes fake ones, where Mario will die after say 15 seconds somehow, but often especially later in a course, you have complex puzzles in which the only benefit of the solution is Mario dies and you can start over from the checkpoint you reached.

jerf• 3 years ago

Among the many things I've wished I had time to do, I've wanted to sit down and build a procedural level generator in which the 'tricks' you refer to are first-class citizens, meaning both that they could be incorporated into the levels consistently by the generator and that we could control their introduction into the player's vocabulary consistently.

This approach could be a viable approach to that, but it may need some tuning. It is possible that the problem in this case is less GPT and more the training set; the examples given imply that the levels were characterized as a whole by some very superficial criteria, so it isn't necessarily a surprise that the resulting levels are equally superficial. The system was never trained on "shell jump" (not that that appears in Mario 1 AFAIK, it's just the first Mario term that came to mind), so it never produces them. I would want to look at training on a screen-by-screen basis, with some overlap, rather than levels, and more richly categorizing the input data.

If I were designing a new Indie game, I'd be feeding it some hand-crafted level snippets. However, in terms of getting it out, it would be hard to know whether I can feed the GPT system enough input with enough categorizations to know whether it would just be more cost-effective to design the levels directly. At the moment it is not obvious to me how to convince GPT to understand the concept of level flow, or even something as simply as "this pipe is physically impossible to jump over".

It is also possible there just isn't enough input data to really make this slick. There aren't that many publicly-available Mario levels.

jhoelzel• 3 years ago

Port Mario to WebGL, integrate this model, tell you friend he gets 100 bucks when he beats the level ;)

On another thought: this could probably replace the chrome dino pretty well

sylware• 3 years ago

I wonder if ML will find its way to maths as a assistive intuition.

nomilk2• 3 years ago

Are the levels playable, or just static lookalikes without moving parts?

Incidentally, there's a nice example of a text representation of a level in the source code (requires scrolling horizontally, which isn't totally obvious from the GitHub UI): https://github.com/shyamsn97/mario-gpt/blob/main/mario_gpt/l...

Some parts are recognisable, for example the flag pole (which is typically at the end of mario levels, I believe).

shyamsn97• 3 years ago

Hey! One of the authors of the paper here. Actually, many of our generated levels are playable because our model actually predicts the path of a search algorithm (A* agent) that was able to solve a ton of levels. MarioGPT is not always perfect though, as it sometimes predicts impossible jumps lol

nomilk2• 3 years ago

Very cool, it's an awesome project, and thanks also for replying!

tantalor• 3 years ago

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.05981.pdf

vyrotek• 3 years ago

I'm surprised there haven't been more games like Cloudberry Kingdom. It has fantastic level generation with a bunch of settings to play with. Players can even have various movement abilities which the level generation considers. If you got stuck it provided an AI to follow.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/210870/Cloudberry_Kingdom...

lldb• 3 years ago

I remember having this one on the Wii U... Each level wasn't as much a level but more a short "trick" the player had to complete. It seemed to choose a path first, then place obstacles just narrowly avoiding the chosen path.

gigel82• 3 years ago

It's interesting because this is using GPT-2 (https://huggingface.co/distilgpt2 specifically) which you can just fine on a reasonable GPU.

But I'm not convinced the results are any smarter than a randomized procedural generation (I'm sure using it for text generation instead will yield sub-par results).

anthk• 3 years ago

Retux and Wario Land like games make better levels for sure because of the puzzles.

rolenthedeep• 3 years ago

Can't wait to see someone hook this into an AI that plays the levels and put it on Twitch

MarioGPT Uses AI to Generate Endless Super Mario Levels for Free

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