@inproceedings{hong-etal-2025-game,
    title = "Game Development as Human-{LLM} Interaction",
    author = "Hong, Jiale  and
      Wu, Hongqiu  and
      Zhao, Hai",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.218/",
    pages = "4333--4354",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "Game development is a highly specialized task that relies on a complex game engine powered by complex programming languages, preventing many gaming enthusiasts from handling it. This paper introduces the $\textit{Chat Game Engine (ChatGE)}$ powered by LLM, which allows everyone to develop a custom game using natural language through Human-LLM interaction. To enable an LLM to function as a ChatGE, we instruct it to perform the following processes in each turn: (1) $P_{script}$: configure the game script segment based on the user{'}s input; (2) $P_{code}$: generate the corresponding code snippet based on the game script segment; (3) $P_{utter}$: interact with the user, including guidance and feedback. We propose a data synthesis pipeline based on LLM to generate game script-code pairs and interactions from a few manually crafted seed data. We propose a three-stage training strategy following curriculum learning principles to transfer the dialogue-based LLM to our ChatGE smoothly. We construct a ChatGE for poker games as a case study and comprehensively evaluate it from two perspectives: interaction quality and code correctness."
}