A game engine designed to simplify 2D video game development

In recent years, the increasing popularity of casual games for mobile and web has promoted the development of new editors to make video games easier to create. The development of these interactive applications is on its way to becoming democratized, so that anyone who is interested, without any advanced knowledge of programming, can create them for devices such as mobile phones or consoles. Nevertheless, most game development environments rely on the traditional way of programming and need advanced technical skills, even despite today’s improvements. This paper presents a new 2D game engine that reduces the complexity of video game development processes. The game specification has been simplified, decreasing the complexity of the engine architecture and introducing a very easy-to-use editing environment for game creation. The engine presented here allows the behaviour of the game objects to be defined using a very small set of conditions and actions, without the need to use complex data structures. Some experiments have been designed in order to validate its ease of use and its capacity in the creation of a wide variety of games. To test it, users with little experience in programming have developed arcade games using the presented environment as a proof of its easiness with respect to other comparable software. Results obtained endorse the concept and the hypothesis of its easiness of use and demonstrate the engine potential

Recent Advances in General Game Playing

The goal of General Game Playing (GGP) has been to develop computer programs that can perform well across various game types. It is natural for human game players to transfer knowledge from games they already know how to play to other similar games. GGP research attempts to design systems that work well across different game types, including unknown new games. In this review, we present a survey of recent advances (2011 to 2014) in GGP for both traditional games and video games. It is notable that research on GGP has been expanding into modern video games. Monte-Carlo Tree Search and its enhancements have been the most influential techniques in GGP for both research domains. Additionally, international competitions have become important events that promote and increase GGP research. Recently, a video GGP competition was launched. In this survey, we review recent progress in the most challenging research areas of Artificial Intelligence (AI) related to universal game playing

Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games (Dagstuhl Seminar 12191)

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12191 "Artificial and Computational Intelligence in Games". The aim for the seminar was to bring together creative experts in an intensive meeting with the common goals of gaining a deeper understanding of various aspects of artificial and computational intelligence in games, to help identify the main challenges in game AI research and the most promising venues to deal with them. This was accomplished mainly by means of workgroups on 14 different topics (ranging from search, learning, and modeling to architectures, narratives, and evaluation), and plenary discussions on the results of the workgroups. This report presents the conclusions that each of the workgroups reached. We also added short descriptions of the few talks that were unrelated to any of the workgroups

Early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design

This paper reports on the third Early Aspects: Aspect-Oriented Requirements Engineering and Architecture Design Workshop, which has been held in Lancaster, UK, on March 21, 2004. The workshop included a presentation session and working sessions in which the particular topics on early aspects were discussed. The primary goal of the workshop was to focus on challenges to defining methodical software development processes for aspects from early on in the software life cycle and explore the potential of proposed methods and techniques to scale up to industrial applications

Representing Game Dialogue as Expressions in First-Order Logic

Despite advancements in graphics, physics, and artificial intelligence, modern video games are still lacking in believable dialogue generation. The more complex and interactive stories in modern games may allow the player to experience different paths in dialogue trees, but such trees are still required to be manually created by authors. Recently, there has been research on methods of creating emergent believable behaviour, but these are lacking true dialogue construction capabilities. Because the mapping of natural language to meaningful computational representations (logical forms) is a difficult problem, an important first step may be to develop a means of representing in-game dialogue as logical expressions. This thesis introduces and describes a system for representing dialogue as first-order logic predicates, demonstrates its equivalence with current dialogue authoring techniques, and shows how this representation is more dynamic and flexible

Non-determinism in the narrative structure of video games

PhD ThesisAt the present time, computer games represent a finite interactive system. Even in their more experimental forms, the number of possible interactions between player and NPCs (non-player characters) and among NPCs and the game world has a finite number and is led by a deterministic system in which events can therefore be predicted. This implies that the story itself, seen as the series of events that will unfold during gameplay, is a closed system that can be predicted a priori. This study looks beyond this limitation, and identifies the elements needed for the emergence of a non-finite, emergent narrative structure. Two major contributions are offered through this research. The first contribution comes in the form of a clear categorization of the narrative structures embracing all video game production since the inception of the medium. In order to look for ways to generate a non-deterministic narrative in games, it is necessary to first gain a clear understanding of the current narrative structures implemented and how their impact on users’ experiencing of the story. While many studies have observed the storytelling aspect, no attempt has been made to systematically distinguish among the different ways designers decide how stories are told in games. The second contribution is guided by the following research question: Is it possible to incorporate non-determinism into the narrative structure of computer games? The hypothesis offered is that non-determinism can be incorporated by means of nonlinear dynamical systems in general and Cellular Automata in particular

Understanding computer game culture: the cultural shaping of a new medium

In the past few decades, video games have developed from a marginal technological experiment into a mainstream medium. During this period they have gone through several transformations, from arcade machines offering a few minutes of solitary fun for a quarter to monthly subscription-based online MMOs in which thousands of players spend hundreds or even thousands of hours and lead a significant part of their social life as a fantasy character. But what is it that has driven video games? development? Is it technology? Indeed, with every new generation of hardware, game designers were given a broader set of tools for evoking exhilarating experiences. But is not culture at least as important? What would games look like if Tolkien never had written Lord of the Rings, or if Nintendo had not brought Japanese manga drawing styles to the new medium? This book looks at the theoretical challenges and foundations on which to base a cultural shaping approach towards the evolution of video games and proposes a set of concepts for analyzing and describing this process