Amorphous Fortress Online: Collaboratively Designing Open-Ended Multi-Agent AI and Game Environments

TL;DR

Amorphous Fortress Online addresses the challenge of open-ended, generalizable AI in multi-agent environments by delivering a web-based platform where users design, remix, and visualize tiny FSM-driven agents within ASCII fortresses. The approach combines a JavaScript-engine port, modular editors (entity, fortress, text), an interactive play view, and an X-Ray FSM visualization to support emergent behavior exploration and debugging, augmented by a backpack system for cross-fortress collaboration. Key contributions include the FSM-based fortress engine, browser-based tooling, and a roadmap toward mixed-initiative design, entity recommendation, and sprite-generation to cultivate a large, user-generated dataset for future AI research. The work offers practical impact by enabling community-driven AI environment creation, facilitating reinforcement learning training data, and supporting generative modeling research through open-access fortress definitions and interactions.

Abstract

This work introduces Amorphous Fortress Online -- a web-based platform where users can design petri-dish-like environments and games consisting of multi-agent AI characters. Users can play, create, and share artificial life and game environments made up of microscopic but transparent finite-state machine agents that interact with each other. The website features multiple interactive editors and accessible settings to view the multi-agent interactions directly from the browser. This system serves to provide a database of thematically diverse AI and game environments that use the emergent behaviors of simple AI agents.

Figures (11)

• Figure 1: The community-based ZZT game design process showing (a) the base action-adventure ZZT game; (b) the ZZT game editor; (c) the Museum of ZZT BBS website page; (d) a user-created simulation role-playing game using the ZZT engine.
• Figure 2: A visualization of an entity's behavior FSM structure and an instance of its class in the fortress environment
• Figure 3: Two example agent interactions from Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom remade in the Amorphous Fortress framework
• Figure 4: The entity editor screen for Amorphous Fortress Online labeled as follows: A) FSM canvas visual editor; B) Entity selection dropdown; C) Canvas node list; D) Name and character input area; E) Entity node and edge list edit area; F) Fortress entity list
• Figure 5: The fortress editor screen for Amorphous Fortress Online labeled as follows: A) Fortress name input area; B) Fortress placement canvas C) Entity palette; D) Font selection; E) Notes input area; F) Seed input area