Zappy

Zappy is Epitech’s end-of-year team project: a game where nobody holds the controller. Teams of fully autonomous players share a small planet. They must eat, collect stones and gather in groups to perform rituals that raise their level, and the first team to bring six players to the top wins.

It is made of three programs that only talk over the network: a server that runs the world, a 3D viewer to watch it, and the AI players themselves.

How it works

The players cooperate without a leader. When one is ready for a ritual it calls the others with a broadcast, and a simple rule decides whose call wins when several ring at once, so the group forms instead of arguing. The viewer lets you click a tile or a player to follow what is happening.

As a bonus I built ZapLauncher: language-model players that join the game in character, a loyal guard or a greedy merchant, each with its own personality, talking to the others while they play.

What I took from it

• A protocol written down first is what let six people work on three programs at once.
• Letting an AI choose among a few well-named actions, and logging each step, makes it far easier to understand than free-form text.