Adapting Game Mechanics with Micro-Machinations

In early game development phases game designers adjust game rules in a rapid, iterative and flexible way. In later phases, when software prototypes are available, play testing provides more detailed feedback about player experience. More often than not, the realized and the intended gameplay emerging from game software differ. Unfortunately, adjusting it is hard because designers lack a means for efficiently defining, fine-tuning and balancing game mechanics. The language Machinations provides a graphical notation for expressing the rules of game economies that fits with a designer’s understanding and vocabulary, but is limited to design itself. Micro-Mach

Adapting Game Mechanics with Micro-Machinations

International audienceIn early game development phases game designers adjust game rules in a rapid, iterative and flexible way. In later phases, when software prototypes are available, play testing provides more detailed feedback about player experience. More often than not, the realized and the intended game-play emerging from game software differ. Unfortunately, ad-justing it is hard because designers lack a means for effi-ciently defining, fine-tuning and balancing game mechanics. The language Machinations provides a graphical notation for expressing the rules of game economies that fits with a designer's understanding and vocabulary, but is limited to design itself. Micro-Machinations (MM) formalizes the meaning of core language elements of Machinations enabling reasoning about alternative behaviors and assessing quality, making it also suitable for software development. We pro-pose an approach for designing, embedding and adapting game mechanics iteratively in game software, and demon-strate how the game mechanics and the gameplay of a tower defense game can be easily changed and promptly play tested. The approach shows that MM enables the adaptability needed to reduce design iteration times, consequently increasing op-portunities for quality improvements and reuse

A Lightweight, Composable Metamodelling Language for Specification and Validation of Internal Domain Specific Languages

This work describes a declarative and lightweight metamodelling framework called uMF for modelling and validating structural con- straints on programming language data-structures. By depending solely on the Lua language, uMF is embeddable even in very constrained embedded systems. That way, models can be instantiated and checked close to or even within the final run-time environment, thus permitting validation to take the current state of the system into account. In contrast to classical metamodelling languages such as ECore, uMF supports open world models that are only partially constrained. We illustrate the use of uMF with a real-world example of a robot control formalism and compare it with a previously hand-written implementation. The results indicate that strict formalization was facilitated while flexibility and readability of the constraints were improved.status: accepte