Layered Game Engine: A Compositional Architecture for Executable Game Worlds

Game engines typically combine multiple concerns, including world representation, game state, mechanics, execution, and presentation, into tightly coupled systems. This coupling can make it difficult to reuse game logic, modify individual aspects of a game, or reason about game behavior at different levels of abstraction. We present a layered game engine architecture that explicitly separates these concerns into distinct computational layers while maintaining an executable representation of the game. The architecture is designed around the idea that game behavior can be represented and transformed at different levels of abstraction while remaining composable and executable. We implement a prototype engine capable of running a complete game using this layered representation. This work investigates whether explicit layering can provide a useful abstraction for constructing and modifying interactive environments. We study the effects of the architecture on modularity, component reuse, modification cost, execution overhead, and scalability compared with conventional game-engine organization. The prototype provides a basis for evaluating whether layered representations can make game environments more structured, composable, and amenable to automated reasoning and learning. We release the architecture and prototype implementation as a foundation for further investigation of structured game representations and their use in learning-based interactive environments.