DashVMC: Real-Time Discrete World Model Control in Geometry Dash

Abstract

World-model agents are usually evaluated in simulators that can wait for the policy; live games impose the opposite constraint, requiring capture, prediction, and action before the next frame. We present DashVMC, which learns a compact, action-conditioned world model from approximately two hours of recorded Geometry Dash gameplay. To test whether the learned dynamics are actionable, a controller is initialized by behavioural cloning (BC) and refined with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) entirely in frozen-model rollouts, without further interaction with the live game. Across three controller seeds, the refined policies survive longer than their BC initializations on all three official levels and a held-out community layout. At deployment, the baseline skips visual generation and sustains a 60-Hz capture-to-action loop on a consumer GPU. Action-conditioned continuations and rollout diagnostics show that the model remains useful for control despite imperfect long-horizon fidelity.

arXiv comment10 pages, 2 figures. Accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 workshop "PTA: From Pretrained Representations to Acting Agents". Project page: https://tariolle.github.io/dash-vmc/