If you are a TUM student and are interested in writing a thesis with me, this is the right place for you!
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*I currently have high capacities, but my focus for the upcoming year is to finish my dissertation, so I only take highly relevant topics.
Send me an email with a short description of which topic below interests you and why. You can also suggest your own topics, but there is no guarantee I am going to supervise it. Also attach your transcript of records and put a smiley of your choice in the subject line :^)
My main research interest is a toolkit called “pix:e - Player Experience Engine”. The vision for it is to provide support in game development for the game designer and the team by breaking down complex tasks, tracking dependencies within the design, and helping in the ideation stage of a project. There exists a paper about PaceMaker, the proof of concept in the early stages of the project. Since then, it has evolved from pacing considerations to general game design support in terms of player experience, pix:e. The project consists of a frontend written in Nuxt4 and a backend written in Django and has many interesting sides for potential thesis topics. Here are the highest priority topics as of now.
Keywords: Nuxt4, Vuejs, Frontend
In a preliminary interview study, we discovered that man game designers are working with digital whiteboards, for good reasons. The user interface of pix:e has many entry points that naturally work with this type of workflow. In this thesis, you are updating the user interface of pix:e to more closely resemble that of digitial whiteboards like Miro or Figjam.
Keywords: Diagrams, Frontend, Nuxt4, Vuejs
pix:e uses a pathfinding algorithm similar to PaceMaker to find paths through the designed space. Currently, it only allows to visualize simple line diagrams. This thesis includes extending this visualization with everything that might be of interest based on an initial research phase. A focus of this is going to be implementing Pacing Diagrams based on this PacingDiagrams paper.
Keywords: Full-stack, Nuxt4, Django
A case study where SPARC and SPINE were used to develop a game revealed their usefulness. At the same time, smaller issues and new ideas arose based on the findings. Your task in this thesis is to look at the results of the case study and find and implement solutions for the currently existing issues and ideas.
Keywords: Python, LLMs, Data Analysis Bonus: Co-authorship likely
We analyzed 100.000 steam reviews and extracted player expectations. Player expectations help developers understand what players expect of a given genre or type of game. This thesis continues this work and cleans up the results.
Keywords: Interview, User Study Bonus: Co-authorship highly likely
Interviewing Game Designers for problems in their workflow is a high value activity for everyone involved, as unveils the actual problems in real world scenarios, and leads to new research directions to solve these problems. We already interviewed 7 game designers, and the intermediate results are very promising. Now we want to interview another batch of a similar size to strengthen the results. In this thesis you are accompanying me in interviewing game design practitioners to find pain points of their workflow which can then ultimately be solved by the toolkit pix:e.
I sometimes supervise a group of students in a normal practical course in a topic related to pix:e. Generally speaking, you would be doing frontend and/or backend development for new and existing features. The details are usually discussed based on the team and the current state of the tool.
I also supervise Gameslab practical courses. You can choose a topic or I give you one. Part of the course structure is to use pix:e during development and give feedback. This replaces the “traditional” design document you would have to write in other practical courses.