Game development, software engineering, and artificial intelligence as three overlapping fields A Venn diagram of three equally sized overlapping circles labelled game development, software engineering, and artificial intelligence. The central region where all three overlap is shaded and labelled "most projects sit here". game development software engineering artificial intelligence most projects sit here The lab works where game development, software engineering, and artificial intelligence meet. Most of the projects below sit in that middle region. 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. Emotional memory in generative characters Whether LLM-driven characters remember what mattered to them, and whether that is grounded in psychology. Interrogating generative NPCs Can an LLM-driven character hold up under pressure? Building a framework to find out. Staying in character Keeping a character consistent over a long conversation by working inside the model rather than the prompt. playtesting 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. One agent, many play styles Getting behavioural variety out of a single playtesting agent instead of training a separate one per style. Persona-based playtesting, surveyed Taking stock of persona-driven agents for automated playtesting, and how little the field agrees on. game software engineering How games are maintained after release What developer-written patch notes across a whole storefront reveal about post-release maintenance. Open-source games as software Characterising open-source video games from a software engineering standpoint. Creativity beyond functionality A large-scale look at hidden content in games: the creative work that serves no functional purpose. Migrating to a typed language How JavaScript projects actually move to TypeScript, and whether code quality follows. Legacy modernization with coding agents Putting an AI coding agent on a real industrial migration and measuring what it delivers. Transpiling the good old days Bringing games written for a long-obsolete BASIC dialect back to life on a modern runtime. engines 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. Automating the move to the GPU Generating GPU plumbing for ECS systems automatically, and working out at runtime when the GPU is actually worth it. generative content Generating game assets end to end How far an automated pipeline can get toward usable text and art for a game character. Translating games with small models Whether models small enough to run on an ordinary machine can translate game dialogue, including into low-resource languages.