AI-made action games

An action game is a video game that emphasizes physical challenges, mainly hand-eye coordination and reaction time. The core loop is short and repeated: read the screen, react, and survive the next threat, with little time for long planning. Platformers, shooters and fighting games are all action games, and Space Invaders and Pac-Man are classic examples.

The code reads input every frame, moves the player and the enemies, and tests for collisions between them, usually with simple shapes such as rectangles and circles. Many action games also track lives, health and score across a run.

In a browser, the frame loop runs on requestAnimationFrame, which fires once per screen refresh and pauses in background tabs. Movement has to scale with the elapsed time it reports, or the game runs faster on high refresh-rate screens.