PenGwyn AI-Assistive Control Scheme
PenGwyn is a behavioural based AI-assistive control scheme, designed to asses a players performance and provide personalised assistance. It has been designed around the Soulslike genre of videogames and is special adapted to the core combat mechanics the genre is most commonly known for.
This Project was designed to teste if the inclusion of an Ai-assistive Control Scheme improves the rate at which player learn Soulslike games and if it allows individual who struggle to gain a better first experience allowing for more individuals to experience the genre.
Details & Responsibilities
PenGwyn AI-Control Scheme
4th Year Honours Project
September 2025 - May 2026
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All test experience gameplay features
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AI functionality
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AI equations and maths implementation
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Graphics and audio intergration
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UI and UX design
Programming & Game Mechanics
Gameplay Experience
The Gameplay experience developed to showcase this project was done in UE5 and made user of Fab purchased assets. its primary purpose was to allow for a reusable ad effective testing environment for the PenGwyn AI. It makes use of common Dark Souls design philosophy.
The Gameplay is contained within a custom built dungeon style level. It contains four separate combat encounter rooms, with an escalation of difficulty as the player progresses.
There are two types of enemies, The light and heavy. They make use of UE5 AI infostructure and use Behavioural trees to produce exciting and varied gameplay. They are find in differing number as the level progresses and are designed to work alongside each other taking turns to attack the player, whiles also surrounding and ganging up on them.
The Experience has multiple Menus Implemented That all allow the player to navigate the gameplay experience.
The menus also allow for the different assistance types to me manually changed and lock to specific levels, allowing the user to customize their experience and tailor the assistance provided to be what they want.
PenGwyn AI
PenGwyn makes use of multiple PDI Fitness functions to produce a set of attribute scores that can then be used to evaluate and determine the players aptitude in each of the core gameplay attributes: Attacking, Defending, Health, Evasion, Item Usage, and Targeting
These scores are used within a assignment functions that utilize value partitioning to determine when bracket the players score should be within. These brackets each tell the PenGwyn system to active different levels of the assistance type, with each level having slightly layer behaviour and functionality.
The different assistance types are shown at the bottom of the screen, form left to right they are: Item Usage, Roll I-Frames, Attack Range, Player Stats, Guarding and Auto Lock on.
PenGwyn locally logs all gameplay data and stores it to a Json file. This file shows all used date for each combat encounter. The data stored in this file is used by the fitness functions.
PenGwyn's calculations make use of an encounter based assessment timeframe. The assistance provided to the player is only calculated at the end of a combat encounter. Where the newly calculated score is compared to the previous and a updated and more accurate level of assistance is provided.
