Football AI Inspector

Inspiration

A football simulation can make a pass that looks wrong while hiding whether perception, pressure, player attributes, tactical context, style, or bounded variance caused the result. We wanted engineers, AI designers, and QA to share the same evidence instead of debating the final animation.

What it does

Football AI Inspector turns captured Unreal Engine telemetry into a replayable decision. It walks through Scan, Evaluate, Choose, and Execute; keeps every rejected route visible; ranks candidates with exact lower-is-better scores; and traces the strongest logged factors behind the winner. Decision Lab can paste, drop, or open a local v1 JSON file, compare two snapshots, and export a deterministic Markdown review packet. Files stay in browser memory and are never uploaded.

How we built it

The submission is a standalone offline HTML artifact backed by a versioned telemetry fixture, draft 2020-12 JSON Schema, and a strict adapter boundary for a future Unreal exporter. The interface uses semantic controls, keyboard navigation, live announcements, reduced-motion support, forced-colors support, and a responsive 320 px layout. Forty-nine automated checks cover schema and adapter invariants, import safety, decision diff, export, content drift, runtime errors, network isolation, and real Chromium interactions.

GPT-5.6 through Codex helped inspect the read-only prototype and validated evidence, define the product boundary, implement the interface and adapter, diagnose failures, expand the test contract, and produce the English documentation and demo. Human review kept the key product decisions explicit: offline first, lower scores are better, captured rather than live telemetry, no synthetic gameplay enhancement, and a debug-free final demo.

Challenges and lessons

The hardest part was making a complex score honest without coupling the UI to simulation internals. Atomic validation, exact derived margins, visible rejected candidates, and provenance disclosures keep the inspector useful without overstating what the capture contains. We also learned that submission media needs the same rigor as code: the final 2:54 demo uses a genuine debug-free Unreal replay, synchronized captions, clean full-HD encoding, and a public YouTube path.

The Football Universe foundation existed one day before Build Week. Most decision and test extensions shown in the demo, and the complete inspector product, were built during Build Week.

What's next

A production Unreal exporter can emit the same versioned envelope. The inspection pattern can then expand from passes to positioning, defensive choices, substitutions, and other agent decisions.

Built With

• css3
• html5
• javascript
• json
• playwright
• unreal-engine