Towards a Unified System for Controlling Aesthetics in Video Games Using Graph-Based Spatial Models

Paper: Hemming, P., and Dyrda, D. (2025). Towards a Unified System for Controlling Aesthetics in Video Games Using Graph-Based Spatial Models. SKILL Conference 2025.

Abstract: This paper presents a unified system for aesthetics control in video games, addressing two key challenges: the lack of structured spatial models for triggering aesthetics changes and the fragmentation of aesthetics subsystems across independent components. Building on the Space Foundation System (SFS), a graph-based abstraction of game space, our system enables designers to assign and transition between Aesthetics Profiles in a semantically meaningful way. It unifies the control of diverse modalities—including lighting, audio, and post-processing—within a coordinated framework. We provide a concept for the general system architecture, present a concrete implementation in the Unity game engine, and demonstrate the system’s usability and expressiveness through a fully functional demo scene.