How to Make a Bot for a Game? – Expert’s Guide
How to Make a Bot for a Game?
This blog is a simple yet effective tutorial on how to make a bot for a game. Quite simply, video game bots are instances of artificial intelligence (AI) that play a game instead of a player. Game bots perform various tasks, from acting as players to non-player characters (NPCs) doing farm work.
Building a gaming bot is exciting because it demands skills in diverse areas such as windows API, machine vision, and multithreading. Sometimes, you need very intimate knowledge of computer systems to optimize certain parts of your code.
Key Takeaways:
1. A game bot is a program that plays a game on behalf of a human player.
2. Game bots can be created using programming languages such as Python or C++.
3. Game bots can be built using techniques such as reinforcement learning.
4. To build a game bot using Python, you have to install relevant libraries, observe the game state, and perform actions based on reinforcement learning techniques.
This tutorial will explore building a computer game bot in Python or C++.
How to Make a Bot for a Game?
A Game Bot is an automated program that plays the game on behalf of human players. Since they can play without a break, game bots can accumulate money and items much faster than regular human players.
You can create your bots for games, online activity, and more. But how? There are a few things to consider before creating a bot. It will likely come down to knowing a programming language like Python or C++.
With programming expertise, developers must create macros that serve as a general behavior map for the game bots. These allow you to program bots to do anything you want them to. Whether it’s a repetitive task, or something more complex, macros will be your lifeline here.
Technique
We are going to build a bot for a game that uses the “Reinforcement Learning” technique. I’ll explain that later. We will build this game bot using OpenAI’s Gym and Universe libraries.
Your method, process, and approach depend on what you want your bot to do. Do you want it to act in static ways, dependent on your lines of code? Or do you want them to follow you and assist as cooperative players?
While much of the bot’s behavior rests on your coding skills and overall goals, you must also be careful. For example, if you run into server-side detection, you could get banned from a game.
Making a Game Bot with Python
Now follow the steps:
Step 1 – Installation
Ensure you have Python installed or install it using Homebrew. You can download a dedicated Python IDE like PyCharm or iPython notebook. I like to keep it simple and use Sublime. Finally, install Gym, Universe, and other required libraries using pip.
Step 2 – Code the Game Bot
The Game Bot is coded in Python, so we start by importing the only two dependencies needed: Gym and Universe.
- Import gymimport universe
For this Game Bot, let’s use my favorite childhood game, Neon Race Cars, as the test environment. Universe lets you run as many environments as you want in parallel. But for this project, we will use only one.
Reinforcement Learning
Now we add the game bot logic that uses the reinforcement learning technique. This technique observes the game’s previous state and reward (such as the pixels seen on the screen or the game score). It then comes up with an action to perform on the environment.
Now we can retrieve the list of observations for each environment initialized using the env.reset() method.
- observation_n = env.reset()
The next step is to create a game agent using an infinite loop, which continuously performs some action based on the observation. We then use the env.step() method to use the action to move forward one-time step. It is an actual implementation of reinforced learning.
The step method here returns four variables:
- observation_n: Observations of the environment
- reward_n: If your action was beneficial or not: +1/-1
- done_n: Indicates if the game is over or not: Yes/No
- info: Additional info such as performance and latency for debugging purposes
Now you have the Game Bot ready to compete with the environment. The complete code for this basic bot and an advanced version is available on scrapewithbots.
Step 3 – Run the Game Bot
Run the Game Bot for fun: ensure Docker is running and run the bot. See it in action beating other cars or failing to do so. If it fails, keep tweaking your bot to make it beat intelligence!
- python gamebot.py
Game Automation Using Python
I made a Python Script to Automate a Sudoku Game on Android.
The script can be divided into 5 parts:
- Connecting to an Android device using ADB and getting the screenshot of the game from it
- Using Pillow to process the screenshot for pytesseract
- Using pytesseract to extract the Sudoku Game Grid to a 2D List in Python.
- Solving the Sudoku Game
- Sending the solved input to your Android Device using Python
Out of the 5, I will focus mainly on libraries used, using ADB to connect to your device, processing the screenshot with Pillow, and others visiting ScrapeWithBots.
Note: Game automation has some drawbacks also like impact on your own gameplay experience and disruption of the gameplay of other players.
Libraries Used
- Pillow
- pure-python-adb
- pytesseract
- progress
Using ADB to Connect to your Device
- Go to your Phone Settings > System > Developer Options (This might vary in different phones, so if it is not the same in yours, look it up on the internet)
- Turn on Android Debugging and ADB over Network.
- Note the IP Address and Port shown under ADB over Network
- Install ADB on your computer
- Go to your command-line / command prompt and enter: adb connect <ip-address>:<port>
- Use the IP Address and Port from Step 3
- You will need to authorize the connection on your phone:
- when connecting for the first time.
- You should connect your device to your PC over WiFi.
Processing the screenshot with Pillow
In the captured screenshot, the accuracy of any OCR will be very low. To increase accuracy, I used Pillow to process the screenshot so that it only shows the numbers in black color on a white background.
Using an image, we first convert the image to grayscale (or single channel). convert(‘L’). It will convert the colors to shades of grey (0-255).
How to Make a Bot for a Mobile Game?
In this article on how to make a bot for a game now, now I will explain how to make a bot for a mobile game. Here is the concept, and follow the steps:
Concept
- We use a Windows PC since it can run/emulate practically any game on any platform.
- We use a macro recorder + editor to create a simple automated script. (Recording and Playing Back / Editing inputs for automated gameplay)
- We record simple action loops, loop them infinitely and edit them to create a simple bot.
- This way, we can create scripts for all kinds of things. The features depend on the game you want to bot and on your skill/expertise.
Step #1: Use an Emulator
Use an emulator if your game is not compatible with Windows PC. There are many Android emulators, iOS emulators, and console emulators for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Consoles, etc.
Step #2: IF loop and EXE Files or Free Macros
IF loop programming and compiling EXE files are insanely helpful when trying to create a bot for any game. However, you can also use your favorite search engine to find plenty of free macro recorders that offer enough features to create simple bots.
Step #3: Identify Key Elements
Look at your game. What can you do using simple mouse movements, clicks, color recognition, if statements, keyboard inputs, swipes, taps, etc.? If you are on an emulator, try to use the emulator’s tools when planning your bot.
Also, think about challenges, what UI elements are static, which ones change position, and how can I reset the bot automatically if it gets stuck. – To figure this out, you will have to create a bunch of bots first to gain the expertise needed for perfect planning.
Step #4: Use Macro Recorder to Create a Loop
Now it is time to hit record in your macro recorder. Make sure that you complete a loop in which your starting state of the game is the same as the end state. So, for example, if you are farming a mission and starting the main menu, make sure that you return to the main menu before you stop your recording so that later on, you can loop the recorded script and play it back in an infinite loop.
For other bots, visit https://scrapewithbots.com/.
FAQS: How to Make a Bot for a Game
How do game bots work?
Game bots work by performing both repetitive tasks and adaptive learning tasks according to the way they are coded. It can be a static script for their tasks or Intelligent systems like Universe Libraries and OpenAI for Reinforced Learning. This is how game bots work.
Final Thoughts
You now have all of the tools you need to go about building your simple bots. Having this information about how to make a bot for a game sets the basis for your game bot development process. The techniques we used in this tutorial are Python and Reinforcement Learning.
We, for instance, run several scripts based on these techniques to automate gaming bots. It’s pretty satisfying to remove a human task with just a few lines of code.
Thanks for reading, and if you have any issues or need help, go on ScrapeWithBots. Good luck, and have fun.