ASCII Expedition
A C++ terminal arcade game that started at a five-session EA game-development workshop in Bucharest. It now has procedurally generated expeditions, three kinds of patrol and two AI pilots you can take over from at any moment.
Stars, guards, sentries and crates worth blasting.
Two short tutorials, then expeditions generated from a seed: collect the stars, dodge guards and scouts, time your approach to the sentries' pulses, and blast bonus crates for power-ups. Three difficulty levels, a run score and a saved best to beat.
Press I and the game plays itself. Touch a key and it's yours again.
Two trained agents are built into the ordinary executable: a small cross-entropy (CEM) weight policy and a PPO neural policy, with no Python or PyTorch needed to play. They decide which objective to chase next, while shared pathfinding moves the character and aims the blaster. Any arrow key hands control back to you mid-run; runs the AI touched are marked "assisted" so they never take your high score.
Both pilots cleared all 2,688 stages they were tested on.
Each policy played both tutorials and twelve expeditions on 32 fresh seeds at every difficulty, without taking a hit, and the C++ versions matched the original Python policies on 5,231 decisions. That is a finite test, not a guarantee, and much of the reliability comes from the map generator and the safe pathfinding; what the models learned is how to score.
C++11 and CMake, with tests over 1,152 generated maps, input handling, saved scores and a real terminal playthrough. The game was inspired by and developed with the EA workshop's materials and guidance; how the original code split between workshop and participants is no longer known, and the repository does not claim it was written from scratch. Code and AI guide.