LevelMerge: Collaborative Game Level Editing by Merging Labeled Graphs

Game development is commonly seen as a collaborative effort, with teams cooperating on the same project. Nowadays, a variety of cloud-based services have shown the benefits of performing tasks in real-time collaboration with others. In this article, we present a system for collaborative game level editing. We model this problem as a special instance of merging labeled directed acyclic graphs. We propose an algorithm that guarantees that the shared game level is always coherent between edits, both hierarchically and semantically. We establish real-time collaboration by initiating merges automatically and by augmenting the game editor interface to allow users to monitor all others' edits in real time. We validate our algorithm by merging complex edits and large game levels. We further validate the collaborative workflow by running a user study with expert game developers, showing that our system works well and collaborative workflows are beneficial to game development.