Replicate-You by loveapplegames
Replicate-You: an experimental neural net based "programming by example" game. Since neural nets are a sort of modern equivalent of black magic, I think this is quite appropriate for the "summoning" theme.
Your goal is to summon a replica that plays a simple "pick up the coins and avoid the enemies" game as well as possible. To achieve this, you have to play the game yourself for some time, then you can summon a replica that copies the player's behaviour. Every time you let the replica play a level, the game gathers stats on its performance.
Use cursor keys or WSAD to move.
Note, you don't have to finish the levels to gather behavioural data: each move counts. What matters is that you make moves that optimise the behaviour of the replica. If you only play a particular level, you can expect the replica to be best at that level.
You can summon a working replica with as little as 50 moves, more for the higher levels. Plan your moves so the replica doesn't get stuck or hit too many enemies. If it doesn't work, try adding more moves and summon again.
Summoning will train a Tensorflow neural net that copies the behaviour of the player. Each time you move a step, a data point is created. Its input is a 9x9 map context area, its output is the move the player makes (left, right, up, down). The neural net consists of 2 convolution layers and 2 dense layers, and has only about 6,000 parameters, to keep training times tractable. Note that training is quite processor intensive, and requires GPU acceleration, and can make your browser stutter and lag. Training should take about 5-30 sec on a modern PC, depending on the size of the data set.

| Link | http://tmtg.nl/ld55/jgame.html?game=jgame-games/ld55/ |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/55/replicate-me |
Ratings
| Overall | 1045th | 3.119⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 1036th | 2.929⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 28th | 4.273⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 892th | 3.238⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 944th | 3.071⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 756th | 2.395⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 1018th | 2.111⭐ | 20🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 1173th | 2.395⭐ | 21🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 27🗳️ | 30🗨️ |
I "trained" two replicas:
1. A good-playing replica that played by the book
2. A bad-playing replica that only cared about catching blue enemy things
And it kinda worked. I was wondering if it would replicate that behavior or not.
This is probably a game where player needs to treat a computer playing as their baby. :D
"I have nothing more to teach you"
At first, I thought you're mining crypto on my computer, because "summoning" the replica makes everything stutter. :) Also, the site hosting the game is not HTTPS and it felt very unsafe.
I recorded a video if anyone is curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDZgDlrXJ7c
I liked the graphics of when the replica was being calculated. I really noticed that the more steps it had to process, the longer it took. The Menu button was sometimes covering a coin.
I tested making different replicas. One that only walked in tiny circles, and the replica indeed copied it! And one that avoided all coins. Haha, I had fun!
For some reason, my game freezes when training the neural net. I've given it around 300 moves to train on.
In case it's relevant, my PC is beefy (Ryzen 7800X3D, RTX 3080), running firefox with hardware acceleration, on linux.
Edit, I saw the comment from quasilyte and was like "hey... he hosted it on his own site?" And went to take a look, I see it's a .nl site! Jij komt dus ook uit Nederland? ;p I think quasilyte is right to tell you about the http. You should enable that for security reasons :-)
Although the idea is innovative and interesting, I don't think it lends itself very well to being an actual game. Maybe adding some goals for the "summoned" replica would help? Like: "make sure you train a replica that finishes each level in under 30 seconds" or "create a replica that has less than 3 collisions in total" or something like that.
But as a proof of concept this is very well done! If you're planning to expand on this idea, I'd be interested in what you will achieve.
@wouter52, yes I am Dutch! Almost every site is https now, but there is no secure info, like passwords, sent either way, so I don't see the point of installing a certificate.
I think there may be a bit of a disconnect between the training environment and the test environment though. I don't think the AI has any concept of waiting. I tested this by training the AI to only ever move right and just try to get to the right edge of the level while waiting to dodge enemies. But the AI just zoomed to the right at full speed and then turned back around again upon reaching the other side of the board. I tried to account for this lack of a wait action by training the AI to walk in circles until the path is clear of enemies, but that just got it stuck wandering around in the same corner forever:

It would be neat if you could use neural networks somehow to learn player behaviour and use that to create enemies that are specifically hard for that players playstyle.
This was really interesting! Thanks for this submission :D
The mechanics seem frame-dependent, it works super fast on my computer - it's difficult to take a single step and not overshoot, but I've seen the gameplay recording in the comments and it's a lot lot slower.
Thanks for the experience!
This is something I never hoped to come across! I agree that right now, it's more of a tech demo than a game, but there are SO many fun ways to gamefy it! I'm honestly a little excited because even the few replicas I trained seemed to be having their own "personalities", and it was unexpectedly cute :3