Why Hello Reader!
You can go broke making an AI. Did you know Google spent about $3.2 million training AlphaStar? Yeah, I don’t have that kind of budget… yet ;). But that’s part of the challenge, right? Figuring out how to make competitive AIs projects that can compete against humans without burning through your savings.
I recently gave a talk on how to train gaming AI on a budget. It was a deep dive with some incredible AI creators, including a former engineer Timo from Google’s DeepMind team. We covered so much that it’s almost overwhelming, but I’ve distilled the most actionable insights for you.
Here are three lessons from my guests that can make a difference in how you approach this year:
- Leverage Existing Tools and Frameworks
Why reinvent the wheel? Kaiyotech talked about how Rocket League bots thrive with Rocket League Gym, thanks to tools that let them stand on the shoulders of giants. Similarly, StarCraft II AIs have frameworks that save countless hours of development. My goal this year is to introduce you to them so to cut down your workload and get you building faster.
- Focus on Scoped Goals Over Ambitious Full-Scale Projects
Sure, AlphaStar’s full-scale approach is inspiring, but it’s not practical for most of us. Timo said start small. Tackling focused challenges, like mastering micromanagement or using reinforcement learning to refine build order choices, delivers impactful results without requiring massive resources.
- Prioritize Reward Design and Training Efficiency
If you’re diving into RL, the secret sauce lies in the rewards. We’ve seen with SC2 AIs that results can be mixed, but Peter said crafting dense, meaningful objectives helps guide your AI toward desired behaviors faster. Supervised learning on replays is a solid way to jumpstart progress, setting a baseline for deeper RL.
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Building AI for gaming feels like the wild west. There aren’t many roadmaps, and it’s easy to hit dead ends. But that’s what also makes it exciting. The real win is solving the big, tough challenges, not getting bogged down by the smaller stuff—which is why leveraging the right tools and frameworks is so important. It frees up your time to focus on what really matters.
Let’s make 2025 the year we push boundaries and build something amazing together.
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Happy Coding!
Drekken
Founder, VersusAI
May the Bugs Be Ever In your Favour🪲
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P.S. Timo from the DeepMind team said he’d be open to answering more questions if you have them—just let me know!
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