CECILIA: A Toolkit for Visual Game Content Exploration and Modification

Abstract

We investigate the idea of a toolkit for visually exploring and modifying game content, addressing questions, such as how to identify relevant in-game data, how to make use of the data to create in-game visual representations, and what benefits these representations have. To that aim, we build a toolkit on top of the. NET platform employed by Unity in order to explore and add custom content without access to the game's source code. Our visual modifications use live objects in the game as data sources. The results appear as an integral part of the game world, which is generated with the original Unity rendering engine. This capability enables visual exploration for debugging, playtesting, modding, streaming, and data-driven analysis of games, as we demonstrate with several examples.