Our project for Lockheed Martin addresses the challenge of making enemy behavior in tactical PvE games more adaptive and engaging. In many strategy games, players can discover one reliable strategy and repeat it until the game becomes too easy, while harder difficulties often just punish that same strategy rather than encouraging new ways to play. The larger goal of this project is adversarial gameplay modeling, in which the game’s mechanics serve as an intelligent opponent that responds to player decisions. In collaboration with a graduate team developing the adversarial model itself, our role is to create the game environment that will support and test that system.
Our project is a turn-based tactical combat game inspired by Into the Breach. The game takes place on an 8x8 grid and features player-controlled mechs, enemy creatures, and terrain tiles such as water, mountains, grass, and buildings. Each turn, enemies first choose their movement and attacks, then the player responds by moving mechs and attacking to prevent damage and gain an advantage. Our current implementation includes multiple mech and enemy unit types, different movement and attack ranges, a backend game loop with separate gameplay phases, a frontend interface that highlights valid actions, and save/load support. This prototype provides a functional game environment for the graduate team’s adversarial model while also serving as a complete tactical gameplay experience.