mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

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

arXiv 2606.17861 ↗First posted 16 Jun 2026cs.CLcited by 22

On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Software engineering coding agents

Abstract (arXiv)

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.

Key facts. Cited by 22 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Software engineering coding agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 17 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Jun 2026.

Builds on

17 of 26 references.

Closest ancestors · 7

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026WebGameBench: Requirement-to-Application Evaluation for Coding Agents via Browser-Native Games17 May
  2. 2026OpenGame: Open Agentic Coding for Games20 Apr
  3. 2026AutoUE: Automated Generation of 3D Games in Unreal Engine via Multi-Agent Systems7 Mar
  4. 2026GameDevBench: Evaluating Agentic Capabilities Through Game Development11 Feb
  5. 2024OpenHands: An Open Platform for AI Software Developers as Generalist Agents23 Jul
  6. 2024SWE-agent: Agent-Computer Interfaces Enable Automated Software Engineering6 May
  7. 2023ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development16 Jul

Other references · 10

  1. 2023WebArena: A Realistic Web Environment for Building Autonomous Agentscited by 2,006
  2. 2023MetaGPT: Meta Programming for A Multi-Agent Collaborative Frameworkcited by 1,808
  3. 2020CodeBERT: A Pre-Trained Model for Programming and Natural Languagescited by 1,310
  4. 2023Mind2Web: Towards a Generalist Agent for the Webcited by 1,242
  5. 2024OSWorld: Benchmarking Multimodal Agents for Open-Ended Tasks in Real Computer Environmentscited by 1,195
  6. 2026DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligencecited by 1,040
  7. 2023CogAgent: A Visual Language Model for GUI Agentscited by 704
  8. 2024OS-ATLAS: A Foundation Action Model for Generalist GUI Agentscited by 378
  9. 2026GameGen-Verifier: Parallel Keypoint-Based Verification for LLM-Generated Games via Runtime State Injectioncited by 11
  10. 202590% Faster, 100% Code-Free: MLLM-Driven Zero-Code 3D Game Developmentcited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 22.

22 papers.

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  1. 2026GameXpert-Bench: How Far Are Coding Agents from Expert Game Development?cited by 8
  2. 2026RSIAgent: Autonomous Exploration for Recursive Self-improvement in New Environmentscited by 8
  3. 2026Harness-of-Harness: Multi-Day Autonomous Software Development with Continual Improvementcited by 4
  4. 2026AI for Games in the Foundation Model Eracited by 3
  5. 2026GameASG-Bench: Benchmarking Autonomous Software Generation for Game Developmentcited by 1
  6. 2026RecreationWorld: Scalable and Verifiable Environments for Hybrid Computer-Use Agentscited by 1
  7. 2026DashArena: Benchmarking LLMs on Interactive Analytic Dashboard Generationcited by 0
  8. 2026CUA-SWE: When Computer-Use Agents Meet Visual Software Engineeringcited by 0
  9. 2026World Agent: Can Language Models Keep a World Running?cited by 0
  10. 2026SWE-Game: Can Coding Agents Build the Games We Want?cited by 0
  11. 2026A2Z GameSpec-Bench: How Faithfully Can Coding Agents Generate Games from Game Design Specifications?cited by 0
  12. 2026World Editing: Intervening on Executable Worlds at Increasing Depthcited by 0
10 more
  1. 2026OpenGameEval: Benchmarking Agentic Programming and Exploration in a Stateful Game Enginecited by 0
  2. 2026Code2Games: Enabling Coding Agents for Gaming World Generationcited by 0
  3. 2026GAMEGO: Training Game-Dev Agents with Synthetic Trajectories Anchored in Real-World Assetscited by 0
  4. 2026Recursive Game Creator: An Agentic Product-Level Experience-Oriented Game Harnesscited by 0
  5. 2026WorldSolver: Can LLM Agents Simulate the Physical Dynamics via Solver Generation?cited by 0
  6. 2026Don't Guess, Just Ask: Evaluating Interactive Requirement Clarification for Repository-Level Software Developmentcited by 0
  7. 2026ProgramGym: Scaling Training Environments for Long-Horizon Program Reproduction Agentscited by 0
  8. 2026Game-Creation-Agents: Autonomous Game Productioncited by 0
  9. 2026Interaction-as-a-Judgecited by 0
  10. 2026Player-1: Learning to Play from Synthetic Experiencecited by 0

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026GameLogicBench: Evaluating Coding Agents on Runtime Game Logic with Tick-Level State Assertions
  2. 2026Compiled Agency: Frontier General-Purpose Coding Agents Build Winning Game Players from Bare Interaction - from Flappy Bird to StarCraft II and Civilization
  3. 2026GameEngineBench: Evaluating Coding Agents on Real C++ Runtime Environments
  4. 2026GUI Agents for Continual Game Generation
  5. 2026GameReplica: A Benchmark for Black-Box Visual Game Replication by Vision-Language Agents
  6. 2026CraftBench-UE: Deterministic Evaluation for Coding Agents in Unreal Engine
  7. 2026RSIGame: Autonomous Agentic Game Development with Recursive Self-improvement
  8. 2026From Pixels to States: Rethinking Interactive World Models as Game Engines