Aplib: An agent programming library for testing games

Abstract

Testing modern computer games is notoriously hard. Highly dynamic behavior, inherent non-determinism, and fine grained interactivity blow up their state space; too large for traditional automated testing techniques. An agent-based testing approach offers an alternative as agents' goal driven planning, adaptivity, and reasoning ability can provide an extra edge. This paper provides a summary of aplib, a Java library for programming intelligent test agents, featuring tactical programming as an abstract way to exert control on agents' underlying reasoning based behavior. Aplib is implemented in such a way to provide the fluency of a Domain Specific Language (DSL) while still staying in Java, and hence aplib programmers will keep all the advantages that Java programmers get: rich language features and a whole array of development tools.