A Pattern-Based Game Mechanics Design Assistant

Video game designers iteratively improve player experience by play testing game software and adjusting its design. Deciding how to improve gameplay is difficult and time-consuming because designers lack an effective means for exploring decision alternatives and modifying a game’s mechanics. We aim to improve designer productivity and game quality by providing tools that speed-up the game design process. In particular, we wish to learn how patterns encoding common game design knowledge can help to improve design tools. Micro-Machinations (MM) is a language and software library that enables game designers to modify a game’s mechanics at run-time. We propose a pattern-base

Languages of games and play: A systematic mapping study

Digital games are a powerful means for creating enticing, beautiful, educational, and often highly addictive interactive experiences that impact the lives of billions of players worldwide. We explore what informs the design and construction of good games to learn how to speed-up game development. In particular, we study to what extent languages, notations, patterns, and tools, can offer experts theoretical foundations, systematic techniques, and practical solutions they need to raise their productivity and improve the quality of games and play. Despite the growing number of publications on this topic there is currently no overview describing the state-of-the-art that relates research areas, goals, and applications. As a result, efforts and successes are often one-off, lessons learned go overlooked, language reuse remains minimal, and opportunities for collaboration and synergy are lost. We present a systematic map that identifies relevant publications and gives an overview of research areas and publication venues. In addition, we categorize research perspectives along common objectives, techniques, and approaches, illustrated by summaries of selected languages. Finally, we distill challenges and opportunities for future research and development

Computational Support for Play Testing Game Sketches

Early-stage game prototypes need to be informative without requiring excessive commitments. Paper prototypes are frequently used as a way of trying out core mechanics while leaving them easy to change. Play testing on even these earlystage prototypes can give an idea of how the rules play out and whether the game is fun and engaging. Recently, researchers have proposed using automated analysis of games to discover additional properties of games, such as exploits and other gameplay issues. We propose a lightweight game-sketching approach to give designers access to insight derived from both human and machine play testing. Using our system, BIPED, a designer specifies a game’s mechanics and maps them to a set of boardgame-like primitives. Games created with BIPED can be played interactively on a computer as well as automatically analyzed, giving designers two complementary sources of design backtalk. In this paper, we describe the language designers may use to sketch games, how they might use our tool in the two modes of play testing, and how the prototypes are computationally realized. Additionally, we study using our system to prototype a game and examine it in human and machine play tests