Game Engine Wizardry for Programming Mischief
Riemer van Rozen · 2023
Programming grants individuals the capability to design, create, and bring ideas to life. To improve their skills, programmers require powerful languages and programming environments for understanding the impact of gradual code changes. We investigate how modern game engine technology can be leveraged for creating visual input and feedback mechanisms that drive exploratory and live programming. In this paper, we report experiences on creating a visual programming environment for Machinations, a domain-specific language for game design. We share initial findings on how to automate the development of graph- and tree- based editors in Godot, an open source game engine. Our results show that today’s game engine technology provides a solid foundation for future programming language research.