Mage: Multi-Axis Evaluation of LLM-Generated Executable Game Scenes Beyond Compile-Pass Rate
Authors: Hugh Xuechen Liu, Kıvanç Tatar
Organizations: Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg
Abstract
Compile-pass rate is the dominant evaluation signal for LLM code generation, yet for multi-component domain-specific artifacts it can be actively misleading. We demonstrate this on executable game scene synthesis with a four-axis evaluation protocol (named `Mage') -- compile success, runtime success, structural fidelity, and mechanism adherence -- applied to 858 generation attempts across four open-weight LLMs (7B--30B), 26~hand-crafted Unity goal pattern playable concepts, and two automatically extracted IR granularity levels. Direct NL-to-C# generation achieves the highest runtime-pass rate (43% mean) yet produces structurally vacuous scenes (mechanism F1≈0.12). Structural IR conditioning halves the runtime rate but recovers domain-faithful structure (F1 up to 1.00). Within IR conditioning, behavior-only and full-scene granularity are statistically indistinguishable (McNemar p=1.0), indicating input-level granularity saturation. These results show that compile rate is anti-correlated with functional correctness in this domain and that multi-axis evaluation is necessary to detect the divergence. We release the benchmark, replay logs, and per-record metrics for independent verification.