Pacing diagrams are used in game design practice to represent player experience as a temporal structure. However, the term currently refers to heterogeneous and informal artifacts, limiting both interdisciplinary communication and computational use. We propose a minimal formal reference description of pacing diagrams for linear player experience sequences. The contribution defines the core structural elements of the diagram and frames pacing diagrams as both communicative design artifacts and structured representations. This formalization provides a shared point of reference for design practice while enabling consistent interpretation by tools and computational systems. As a first step, it establishes a foundation for more comparable, interoperable, and analyzable representations of player experience in game design.

Design pillars are widely used in game development as high-level principles that define the intended player experience and guide design decisions. Despite their prevalence in industry practice, their role remains underexplored in academic literature. This paper provides a structured description of design pillars and investigates their use through an exploratory questionnaire study with game developers. The results show that design pillars are well understood and commonly used to support early design decisions and team alignment. However, their application is often inconsistent, declines over the course of development, and is challenged by vagueness, difficulty in operationalization, and insufficient documentation. These findings reveal a gap between the conceptual role of design pillars and their practical use. We discuss implications for game design practice and outline directions for future work toward more structured, player-experience-oriented design processes.

Game Design Pillars are natural language artifacts commonly used in game development to communicate a project’s core vision and ensure a coherent player experience. Their linguistic nature aligns well with the strengths of Large Language Models (LLMs), which excel at generating and interpreting natural language, making them promising candidates for supporting mixed-initiative pillar workflows. In this study, we introduce a formal definition of game design pillars, present an initial prototype—SPINE—and investigate the utility of LLMs in the creation and decision-making processes associated with pillar-driven workflows. We begin with a pre-study comparing gemini-2.0-flash and GPT-4o-mini. Results show that Gemini is better suited to our tasks due to greater output variety and consistency. We then conduct a case study by deploying the tool at a local game jam. Findings indicate positive reception and clear value in integrating SPINE into early-stage development. Finally, we interview four experts, demonstrating the tool and allowing them to experiment with it in a controlled environment. While individual perspectives vary, the overall perception is encouraging and supports our intuition: LLMs can meaningfully contribute to game design pillar workflows. These early findings highlight the potential of formalizing pillar-driven design as a research space and point toward several promising avenues for future work.

Modern video games exhibit increasingly complex player movement systems, while accessible and well-structured resources on their underlying implementation remain limited. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing player movement in contemporary 3D action-adventure games. We conduct a comparative study of 20 critically acclaimed titles, identifying 37 distinct movement mechanics and using state counts as a coarse measure of controller complexity. Building on this empirical analysis, we relate observed mechanics to established implementation paradigms drawn from both academic literature and industry practice. By connecting gameplay features to system design strategies, this work contributes to understanding and designing player movement systems.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) is central to modern game development, where structured data input and controllability are critical to achieving high-quality, diverse, and context-aware results. This paper proposes a unified spatial interface for controlling PCG based on the Space Foundation System (SFS). By extending the SFS location graph with hierarchical organization and semantic attributes, we provide a shared spatial interface for diverse PCG systems. To integrate existing algorithms, we propose Data Transformers-modular components that translate location graph data into algorithmspecific parameters. We demonstrate the framework's applicability through three implemented scenarios in the context of asset placement for environmental generation. Our results highlight the potential of the SFS to streamline PCG workflows, enhance modularity, and support both automated and designer-driven content creation. This work contributes a step toward a unified spatial interface for PCG in games.

Central to a game is the player experience, a relation characterized by the indirect nature of how the experience emerges through play. This second-order design problem of games introduces a significant challenge for the game design engineering process. In this paper, we propose a model of the game design engineering process emphasizing the player experience as the primary concern. By facilitating a comparison between a system as-it-is and a system as-it-should-be, this approach has the potential to shape future endeavors for planning, validating, and refining player experience in the context of design engineering.

Player paths are a central design paradigm game designers use for video games. However, keeping track of all designed player paths during development is difficult. This paper proposes a framework that supports developers who use player paths as a central design paradigm. To do so, we look at the definitions of common terms regarding player paths and analyze current workflows used in the video game industry by analyzing presentations at game development conferences. By doing so, we can ensure that our proposed framework uses knowledge from both practitioners and scholars to bridge the gap between them. The framework is based on the usage of graphs and is entirely independent of the functionality of the graph in the video game, ensuring maximal flexibility for the developers. The framework uses features available in game engines, making it possible to use in any development environment. Last, we also demonstrate the tool's functionality via a prototype of the framework in Unity.

This paper presents a time- and space-efficient adaptation of the Space Foundation System, a novel game engine system that abstracts space into semantic locations to bridge the gap between the implementation domain and the problem domain of spatial features in digital games. The presented algorithm discretizes the game space by employing a frontier-based flood fill on a voxel grid to partition the space into locations defined by anchors bounded by delimiters. Integrated into a game engine via extended Transform components, the system enables location queries and supports advanced spatial game features in real time. An evaluation across diverse game environments demonstrates that the algorithm meets practical development requirements regarding computation time and memory usage. The results suggest that the system offers a viable, design-oriented extension to traditional scene graphs.

Current implementation approaches to spatial problems in digital games are not optimal. We identify a significant mismatch between the problem domain and the implementation domain. In this paper, we present the Space Foundation System, a technology for game engines based on a graph data structure focused on location-based semantics. We present a high-level algorithm and implementation approach for deriving a graph by subdividing the game’s space based on integrity. The vision and possible applications of the framework are explored through the use of a gameplay scenario. The presented approach increases the abstraction level of the implementation domain and allows for the implementation of solutions for spatial problems closer to the problem domain.

Designing pacing for video games presents a unique set of challenges. Due to their interactivity, non-linearity, and narrative nature, many aspects must be coordinated and considered simultaneously. In addition, games are often developed in an iterative workflow, making revisions to previous designs difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we present PaceMaker, a toolkit designed to enable common design workflows for pacing while addressing the challenges above. We conducted initial research on pacing and then implemented our findings in a platform-independent application that allows the user to define simple state diagrams to deal with the possibility space of games. The user can select paths on the directed graph to visualize a node’s data in diagrams dedicated to intensity and gameplay category. After implementation, we created a demonstration of the tool and conducted qualitative interviews. While the interviews raised some concerns about the efficiency of PaceMaker, the results demonstrate the expressiveness of the toolkit and support the need for such a tool.

As the popularity of video games has increased, so has the incidence of cheating. Although researchers and game companies have developed various anti-cheating strategies, a common solution involves kernel-level implementations. However, kernel-level anti-cheating engines enjoy high privileges on a user’s computer and thus raise significant privacy concerns. This paper advocates for a privacy-preserving alternative: a server-side anti-cheating engine based on formal game spaces. Our proposed solution leverages the formalization of the game space, analyzing the spatial and logical models of the video game to verify player behavior without compromising user privacy.

Creating digital representations of industrial facilities presents substantial opportunities for the industry. The development of digital twins opens up many prospective applications for industrial plants, such as facilitating virtual training environments, streamlining change management, and providing real-time understanding of remote scenes. However, creating and maintaining these digital twins involves complex tasks, including scanning industrial plants and annotating their subsystems. Many use cases necessitate specifying a Volume of Interest (VoI) for further processing while presenting severe environmental challenges for segmentation quality and worker safety. Besides that, widespread adoption also depends on creating methods that are easy to use, even for workers with limited 3D interaction knowledge. Currently, no commonly implemented method fulfills all these diverse requirements. This paper introduces an approach for specifying a VoI in industrial scenarios. Our approach defines a volume by intersecting the projection of hand-drawn surroundings on a small number of pictures of the target volume, utilizing Augmented Reality and Voxel Carving. It can successfully handle various sizes of target volumes and delivers an appropriately detailed result. Applying qualitative discussions and a quantitative evaluation, we ensure our application meets all requirements posed by the scenarios. This simple interaction metaphor, tailored to specific use cases, can serve as a versatile pattern for various digital twin scenarios. It offers a valuable alternative to 3D primitive-based segmentation methods.

Ubi-Interact is a framework designed to facilitate interactive applications consisting of a variety of individual systems and devices that are distributed over a (local) network. It is designed to allow easy integration of devices and exchange of data based on extendable common data formats. It features edge computing capabilities, allowing to analyze and transform device data. The same computing modules can also be used to manage an arbitrary number of devices in an abstract fashion, allowing ad-hoc handling of (dis-)connecting devices and making devices with similar components/capabilities interchangeable while lowering the necessity to re-implement parts of the overall system behaviour.