The Quest to Build the Perfect Bot w/ Ubisoft's Joshua Romoff

**Joshua Romoff** (0:00)
One of the methods we've been using is called RL, so reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning, if you're using a deep neural network to drive the reinforcement learning. Essentially, you're just giving a reward when the agent does something, the bot does something that you want it to do, and you're giving it a penalty when it does something you don't want it to do. And it's very similar to the way you would potentially train your dog or your cat.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:21)
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Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your guest host Conor Bronsdon and today I'm joined by Josh Romoff, R&D scientist at Ubisoft. Josh, thanks for joining us.

**Joshua Romoff** (1:12)
Yeah, it's great to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:13)
Yeah, we're super excited to have you on the pod today. We've never actually had a game studio on the show before and Ubisoft is a massive name in the industry. 20,000 employees and over 45 studios and you're responsible for some of the biggest gaming franchises in the world, like Assassin's Creed, Rainbow Six and Far Cry, just to name a few. And I do have to admit here that I've spent way too many hours playing the Assassin's Creed franchise myself.
So I'm really excited to dive in and get to talk about Ubisoft a bit. Before we start though, do you have a favorite game yourself?

**Joshua Romoff** (1:47)
Yeah, I mean, for me, it's all about big open world games. So things like Zelda, Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Skyrim, Fallout, currently I've actually been playing Elden Ring.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:59)
I knew you were going to say that.

**Joshua Romoff** (2:00)
Yeah, I mean, it's been a lot of fun.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:05)
Yeah, I'm a bit of a mix.
I love the open world stuff, but I'm also really into some of the weird RTS. So I play a lot of Stellaris on my PC kind of thing as well. And then I'll do Assassin's Creed, Elden Ring.

**Joshua Romoff** (2:17)
RTS stuff really kind of gives me anxiety because I don't know what's going on on the other side of the playground. So anytime I'm playing StarCraft or something like that, it's tough.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:28)
That's fair, that's fair.
It's fun that there's all these different experiences available across these different worlds, these different archetypes. And I suspect that some of the work you're doing at La Forge, the research and development arm of Ubisoft maybe plays into how that creation happens. Can you maybe give the audience the Cliff Notes version of the role that La Forge plays within Ubisoft?

**Joshua Romoff** (2:52)
Yeah, for sure. So Cliff Notes version, Ubisoft La Forge, with a bridge between the academic world and the actual video game productions inside of Ubisoft. So essentially we identify and work on interesting problems that interest both parties. So that's kind of the key. So we're not going to work on things that aren't interesting from a game production standpoint. We want to make sure that our research is very directed in the sense that if it works out, which it doesn't always do inside of research, that there is a path for us to basically implement what we've researched inside the game. And that's what kind of makes us different than other types of research, for instance. And we have offices all around the world and we're constantly expanding and hiring.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:37)
So I'm really fascinated by this because I'll be honest until prepping for this conversation. I really had no idea about the academic research ties with video games.
What's the kind of research that links up with the different games that you're working on?

**Joshua Romoff** (3:52)
So on my ends, and I guess I'm gonna talk from mostly from experience, we're really interested in building bots. And so bots as NPCs, so characters that you're interacting in the game essentially, character they're interacting with, bots that replace players potentially if they drop out of a multiplayer game.