Game Mechanics & Gameplay

Neoja received 1 patent describing a system that converts an entire basketball court into a playable arcade environment. Cameras and sensors track player movement and shot data, projectors paint game visuals across the floor and walls, and RFID wristbands handle entry control, while a built-in highlight system clips key moments and a betting layer gives spectators something to engage with. What sets the approach apart from earlier work is that all of these elements, the backboard sensors, tracking cameras, projection surfaces, adjustable boards, access control, and highlight capture, feed into a single game operating system that lets operators design and update their own custom games. Prior art in the space addressed only one piece at a time, such as backboard displays or shot trajectory analysis, whereas this treats the court itself as the interactive surface.

Wolfhammer PLLC received 1 patent covering a conversion layer that takes real shot data from 2 players and reformats it into something a VR or simulator game can use for head-to-head competition. The system can pull that data through third-party provider APIs, which handles the practical problem of sourcing real-world golf performance information from external platforms. The disclosure is framed at a high level, centering on cross-player data normalization for competitive play rather than introducing a new simulation technique.

SNK received 1 patent for a progression system that lets points earned in versus modes and other non-story modes flow into a fighting game's single-player RPG story mode. A conversion pipeline accumulates those points and turns them into RPG experience, with rates that vary depending on whether the character receiving the experience is the one that earned the points or a different one. Character growth combines automatic increases to level, status, and skill with a player-chosen manual selection of which skill ability value to raise, replacing the earlier model in which story progression depended entirely on experience earned within the story mode itself.

NetEase received 1 patent for a proximity-triggered loot guidance system designed for in-battle airdrop scenarios. Once a player's character enters the area around a dropped supply crate, a directional pointer appears on-screen and tracks the loot's position in the scene. Earlier approaches relied on a map marker and a world identifier that players had to locate and interpret on their own, and this patent adds a close-range on-screen directional cue to reduce that burden.

Cygames received 1 patent for a card battle balancing mechanism tied to turn order. The player who acts later in a match receives a right to trigger a catch-up effect, and a second operation lets that same player cancel it if desired. The Background's prior art describes only deck-based battle games with attribute-linked content, so the specific contribution here is an order-dependent compensation right with a built-in cancel step, rather than a fixed rule applied to all players equally.

Nintendo received 2 patents covering object population and world lighting in game environments. The first describes a spawn system that selects random candidate positions near the player or camera, filters out candidates that are blocked by obstructions unless they share a region with the reference point, and removes distant or long-unseen objects to keep spawn slots available. Deletion also requires the player to have physically moved a set distance, so simply rotating the camera does not trigger despawning. The second patent covers a lighting system built around pre-placed world objects: reaching one triggers regional illumination, reveals map data, restores player health, and unlocks fast travel from that point, while a separate class of launchable item objects lets players extend that lighting effect to distant terrain.

Tencent received 2 patents, both centered on pet mechanics in RPGs. The first covers a capture system in which a player releases a dedicated control to initiate a capture spell on a target pet, with the outcome determined without any manual aiming, thrown-item physics, or environmental factors such as wind or gravity. The second describes a system that carries the species-based interaction two pets display in the open world directly into turn-based combat, mapping the pre-combat relationship between them to the combat mode that activates when they fight. A further element allows the player to engage either pet after the switch, rather than being limited to 1.

Stern Pinball received 1 patent for a persistence system that saves a player's pinball game state to a remote server, tied to a user identifier, and restores it when that player returns for a later session. Cabinet-based pinball devices, as described in the Background, carry no session continuity between plays. This approach allows the machine to pick up where a previous session ended, turning what is traditionally a self-contained game into something with ongoing progression.

Sony received 1 patent for a system that populates virtual concert venues with NPC crowd members whose movements are derived from the real movements of actual performers and audience members, or their avatars. A majority-minority split governs how those movement patterns are distributed across the NPC population, so most of the crowd follows one pattern while a smaller portion follows another, producing a coordinated but varied effect. The Background describes only events where users gather as avatars, making the NPC filler layer the distinct element of the filing.

Skydance Silicon Valley received 1 patent for a timeline scrubbing system that lets players move forward and backward through a game's narrative and gameplay. When a player selects a target point in the timeline, the system scans the traversed segment for mandatory content and, if it finds any, replaces the selected destination with an anchor point just before that required moment rather than allowing it to be skipped. Pinch-point base-asset loading and delta-variable state reconstruction work together to keep the game's state stable enough for this kind of player-facing navigation, which is a departure from the linear progression model in the Background where each segment is gated behind completing the one before it.

EA received 1 patent for a system that adjusts a sports game's field size and player assignments in response to the current number of active users. As players leave or disconnect, the field shrinks along both its length and width according to defined ratios, and a state-driven loop reassigns every character model to field zones weighted by control type. Disconnected players hand off to limited CPU control, and the same system surfaces contextual prompts to remaining players, integrating roster changes, field geometry, and interface overlays into a single connected mechanism rather than handling each as a separate system.

Century Games Pte. received 1 patent for a reward recovery system in a tower defense game that prevents loot from disappearing when a player exits a battle without collecting it. Unclaimed rewards travel with the player into the main city view, where they appear as a tappable icon in the scene, claimable without re-entering the battle instance or switching the game interface. Rewards are pre-placed at coordinate points using allocation weights and drop probability calculations, with proximity to the point of enemy defeat determining which rewards are assigned where.