Issue Nº 2 Ontario Tech University November 2026

Empirical Game Research

Cristiano Politowski
Cristiano PolitowskiAssistant Professor, Ontario Tech University
The guild
is recruiting
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Welcome, traveller

Hi, my name is Cristiano Politowski. I am an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science group of the Faculty of Science at Ontario Tech University, in Oshawa, Canada. My research is about how video games are built, tested and kept alive, and how AI can help with each of those steps.

The Code & Sorcery Lab works where game development, software engineering and artificial intelligence meet.

Video game developmentSoftware testingAI for SEDeep RLEmpirical SE

Also in this issue · latest dispatches

Oct 2026 · news Ontario Tech Science Day 2026 Recapping our lab's involvement in Ontario Tech's Science Day 2026 READ THE DISPATCH ▸ Sep 2026 · news LLM-Based NPCs in Video Games: A Systematic Mapping Study Can LLM-Based Video Game NPCs Enhance Player Immersion? READ THE DISPATCH ▸ Sep 2026 · news Explaining Our AI Research Paper from Inside Minecraft Our latest paper, RIDGE, accepted at IEEE CoG 2026, explores how state-conditioned reward blending allows a single deep RL agent to master multiple play styles. READ THE DISPATCH ▸ Aug 2026 · news Research visit and seminar at UFMG Two weeks at the Department of Computer Science at UFMG in Belo Horizonte, working on LLMs for software development productivity. READ THE DISPATCH ▸

In This Issue

The Codex

A few of the lab's papers.

  1. 2021

    Game industry problems: An extensive analysis of the gray literature

    Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Gabriel C. Ullmann, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

    Read the paper
  2. 2021

    A Survey of Video Game Testing

    Cristiano Politowski, Fábio Petrillo, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc

    Read the paper
Open the codex

Quests

What the lab is working on now.

Engines

What ECS design choices really cost

Several ways to handle collisions in an Entity-Component-System architecture, and the price each one carries.

View the quest Game SE

How games are maintained after release

What developer-written patch notes across a whole storefront reveal about post-release maintenance.

View the quest LLM NPCs

The LLM-NPC landscape

A systematic map of how large language models are being used to drive non-player characters, and where the gaps are.

View the quest Generative

Generating game assets end to end

How far an automated pipeline can get toward usable text and art for a game character.

View the quest Playtesting

PEAK: authoring and training in one loop

An open-source 2D platformer engine where you can design a level and train an agent on it without leaving the tool.

View the quest Playtesting

One agent, many play styles

Getting behavioural variety out of a single playtesting agent instead of training a separate one per style.

View the quest
All quests

Dispatches

Honours Thesis — Class of 2026

Read

Invited lecture — Empirical (RETRO) Game Research

A guest lecture on empirical game research for INFR 3375U/CSCI 5550G Retro Game Development, with four case studies on easter eggs, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy IV, and Pokémon.

Read

OTUGuessr - A GeoGuessr-style campus exploration game for Ontario Tech University

Read

Code & Sorcery Students at HackHive 2026

Read
All dispatches

The Party

Some of the adventurers in the lab right now.

Meet the whole party

The Guild Seeks Adventurers

Now recruiting
  • Prospective MSc and PhD students: start with the code challenge
  • Undergrads looking for a thesis project
  • Researchers who want to collaborate

Get in touch

cristiano.politowski@ontariotechu.ca

Next Issue

  • Feature: Emotional memory in generative characters
  • Interrogation: Generative NPCs under pressure
  • Roll call: Meet the guild