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arxiv:2606.17861

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Published on Jun 16
· Submitted by
Tongxu Luo
on Jun 17
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Abstract

End-to-end game generation presents significant challenges for coding agents, requiring them to create complete playable games from natural language descriptions while meeting specific evaluation criteria for engine grounding, artifact completeness, and interactive verification.

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

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Paper author Paper submitter

Can coding agents build an actual game in a real game engine?

We introduce GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark of 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families for evaluating end-to-end game generation through interactive gameplay verification.

The strongest frontier agent achieves only 41.46%, suggesting that creating complete, playable games remains far from solved.

Demos, code, and data: https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website/

Interesting breakdown of this paper on arXivLens: https://arxivlens.com/PaperView/Details/gamecraft-bench-can-agents-build-playable-games-end-to-end-in-a-real-game-engine-8274-d45a6828
Covers the executive summary, detailed methodology, and practical applications.

Neat paper. It is interesting to see a benchmark tackle end-to-end game generation within an engine like Godot, rather than just writing standalone scripts. The focus on engine grounding and interactive verification seems like a necessary step to see if these models can actually build something playable.

I am curious, since the agents often hit a wall with content and visual feedback, what do you think is the biggest bottleneck in the current feedback loop?

I made a podcast on it with ResearchPod, it makes it easy to get the key concepts on the go:
https://researchpod.app/episode/03e2f80d-a440-4065-a474-82e4e64eed6a

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