GUI Agents for Continual Game Generation

Abstract

Generating a game is not the same as making one playable. Existing code-generation approaches often translate a prompt directly into an artifact, leaving interaction-level failures undetected. We argue that game generation requires a player and study two roles for graphical user interface (GUI) agents. First, we introduce \textbf{PlaytestArena}, an evaluation environment containing 200 browser-based game-generation tasks across eight genres, each paired with rubrics of expected in-play behaviors. An independent GUI judge loads and plays each build to adjudicate these rubrics. Second, we propose \textbf{Play2Code}, in which a game agent and a rubric-blind GUI playtester iteratively generate, play, and refine games through shared memory. The playtester provides gameplay traces and actionable feedback, while a separate GPT-5.5 judge assigns final benchmark scores. Across three frontier backbones, Play2Code achieves a 66.8\% rubric pass rate, outperforming single-pass and agentic-coding baselines by 37.1 and 14.6 points, respectively. Its scores also improve monotonically across refinement rounds. Further analysis shows that GUI-agent feedback is fully logged and traceable, while its priorities vary substantially across model backbones. These results establish GUI playtesting as an evaluation and refinement signal for interactive code generation. Our project website is available at https://continual-game-generation.vercel.app/