Chaser Bots is a project to bring a dead game back to life. Chaser is a 2003 first-person shooter, and like most games its age, its multiplayer servers sit deserted. So I built a crowd of computer-controlled players that join a server and behave like real people: they wander the map, grab health and weapons, and pick fights when they spot an opponent - enough to make an empty server feel alive again. A single PC can run a dozen of them at once, each its own independent player with its own name.

Each bot runs on a small hybrid "brain." Lightweight computer vision reads the game screen the way a person would, a simple decision layer chooses what to do next - explore, go for an item, give chase, or back out when it gets stuck - and a set of reflexes keeps it from walking face-first into walls. The project actually started as a pure imitation-learning experiment: I recorded myself playing and trained a small neural network to copy my movements straight from the screen pixels. That on its own was too unpredictable to trust, so over a few months it grew into the hybrid system it is today, trading some of the "learned" behavior for hand-written logic that's faster, steadier, and far easier to debug. Along the way I added sharper aiming, item-seeking, smoother navigation, support for running a whole roster of bots together, and even a live stream of one bot's-eye view to Twitch.