Quests
Ongoing work in the lab. If something here interests you, get in touch.
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 LLM NPCsEmotional memory in generative characters
Whether LLM-driven characters remember what mattered to them, and whether that is grounded in psychology.
View the quest LLM NPCsInterrogating generative NPCs
Can an LLM-driven character hold up under pressure? Building a framework to find out.
View the quest LLM NPCsStaying in character
Keeping a character consistent over a long conversation by working inside the model rather than the prompt.
View the questPlaytesting agents
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 PlaytestingOne agent, many play styles
Getting behavioural variety out of a single playtesting agent instead of training a separate one per style.
View the quest PlaytestingPersona-based playtesting, surveyed
Taking stock of persona-driven agents for automated playtesting, and how little the field agrees on.
View the questGame software engineering
How games are maintained after release
What developer-written patch notes across a whole storefront reveal about post-release maintenance.
View the quest Game SEOpen-source games as software
Characterising open-source video games from a software engineering standpoint.
View the quest Game SECreativity beyond functionality
A large-scale look at hidden content in games: the creative work that serves no functional purpose.
View the quest Game SEMigrating to a typed language
How JavaScript projects actually move to TypeScript, and whether code quality follows.
View the quest Game SELegacy modernization with coding agents
Putting an AI coding agent on a real industrial migration and measuring what it delivers.
View the quest Game SETranspiling the good old days
Bringing games written for a long-obsolete BASIC dialect back to life on a modern runtime.
View the questEngines and performance
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 EnginesAutomating the move to the GPU
Generating GPU plumbing for ECS systems automatically, and working out at runtime when the GPU is actually worth it.
View the questGenerative content
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 GenerativeTranslating games with small models
Whether models small enough to run on an ordinary machine can translate game dialogue, including into low-resource languages.
View the quest