EvolvedTD: Evolutionary Tower Defense

This is an ancient post that I started in 2015. The actual content is in this Sway presentation, but at this point, you need some context.

During my senior year of college I participated in an experimental (and amazing) class, Evolving Games: CS 404 / Biol 404 by Dr. Terry Soule and Dr. Barrie Robison. Ten computer science students partnered with ten biology students, and we wrote an evolutionary tower defense game, EvolvedTD, where the creeps evolve in response to the player’s tactics.

In the end, we succeeded, and the class incubated Polymorphic Games, a student game development studio, which recently released Darwin’s Demons, a Space Invaders clone with a unique twist. I encourage you to give it a try, it’s quite fun!

EvolvedTD was written in Processing, an Arduino-style Java derivative (really just a pre-processor). My particular task was writing the genome class for our creeps, but I also helped find and solve memory leaks (only some of which were my fault), and prepared the class for collaborative development using Git.

A now private presentation details my analysis of the game’s memory usage in order to find and solve multiple memory leaks which were preventing us from running experiments over many generations of creeps.