I've been working on a new kind of AI game designer, one that explores a game codebase directly and experiments on it. It's led to some surprising conclusions about how even the simplest coding decision can change how an AI works. A short blog + paper: http://www.possibilityspace.org/ai-game-development/

The blog is a brief primer on this new research strand of mine, but the main output for now is a CoG paper I wrote about how software engineering, and specifically game development, affects how an AI understands a codebase. You can get it on arXiv here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.01770 

This work is exciting and interesting to me, but more importantly - as I hint in the blog - it's also an effort to shepherd research from AI game design and make sure it benefits the people who make games, not the bottom line. I want to work with devs of all kinds to guide this.

Thanks for all the kind responses to this! I'm looking forward to doing more of this stuff and chatting with you all about it.