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.

Riemer van Rozen is a lecturer and researcher at the Software Analysis and Transformation group of Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI). Since 2011, he has collaborated with industry in several applied research projects on languages and tools that speed up development and improve software quality. His research focuses on generic solutions for domain-specific languages and live programming environments in general, and automated game design in particular. PhD Dissertation: R.A. van Rozen. “Languages of Games and Play: Automating Game Design & Enabling Live Programming”, University of Amsterdam, Feb 2020. link.