Group items tagged

Abstract: "This article discusses the application of an Alexandrian pattern language to the design of interactive systems. It grew out of an University course titled A Pattern Approach to Action Game Design, which was offered as an elective in the Creative Technologies program at Auckland University of Technology, NZ, in 2011. We sketch out the idea of design patterns and describe our experiences with the process of using them for designing oldschool action games, that is, finding patterns, making a language, using it for creating several game designs and realizing one of these designs collaboratively. We discuss the concept of the course and present our pattern language and the game we made. While the language is arguably more like a patchy pattern collection, the various game designs quite loose and the realized game unfinished, the process was challenging and intense, and offered students a new perspective on design. In the spirit of design patterns, we only did what the task at hand required, not artificial exercises. We attempted to connect theory and practice in a natural, direct way as we presented, discussed and used everything we did in order to continue our journey. Our course was not aimed at fixed or frozen products, but on a process that is constantly in flux through collaboration by people who interact and share a common pattern language, use, test, revise and refine it while moving on."

Abstract: "We propose a powerful new tool for conducting research on computational intelligence and games. 'PyVGDL' is a simple, high-level description language for 2D video games, and the accompanying software library permits parsing and instantly playing those games. The streamlined design of the language is based on defining locations and dynamics for simple building blocks, and the interaction effects when such objects collide, all of which are provided in a rich ontology. It can be used to quickly design games, without needing to deal with control structures, and the concise language is also accessible to generative approaches. We show how the dynamics of many classical games can be generated from a few lines of PyVGDL."

"A First Course in Game ProgrammingMost of today's commercial games are written in C++ and are created using a game engine. Addressing both of these key elements, Programming 2D Gamesprovides a complete, up-to-date introduction to game programming. All of the code in the book was carefully crafted using C++."

"This article is about the learning that occurs from making games, rather than from playing games. In this paper, we describe the use of Rapid Digital Game Creation (RDGC) for learning and teaching Object-Oriented (O-O) concepts. RDGC involves the rapid building of digital games with high-level software that requires little or no programming knowledge. We examine how RDGC supports the understanding of various O-O concepts. Using a theoretical framework of constructionism, we discuss pedagogical guidelines for RDGC-based learning. We suggest that RDGC is a useful pedagogic tool that complements formal programming languages and can help flatten the steep learning curve needed to learn O-O computer programming (or OOP)."

"In the first two parts i and ii of this series, I put together an initial model for node.js multiplayer tic-tac-toe game then bolted in a backbone.js controller framework, which allows clients to Backbone.Model.sync model states to backing server. This post completes the game implementation by adding asynchronous plumbing for synchronizing game state amongst game clients."

"HTML5 is the new shiny thing, and there's a lot of evangelism going on about it. The improvement process is rapid (too much so? that's another blog post), and browser vendors are trying to get the game makers in bed with them, some with means of money, some with fame."

Abstract: "There are a number of existing game frameworks that make use of simplified programming languages with the goal of lowering the barrier of entry into content creation for noncoders. However, existing tools do not support the creation of social, multiplayer games that creators can easily deploy among their family and friends. To address this, we conducted formative interviews to determine the design goals for a tool that would allow non-coders to create such games. We then created Donburi, a web application that enables anyone to design and publish a mobile, social board game."

Abstract: "Collision avoidance and multi-agent navigation is an important component of modern video games. Recent developments in commodity hardware, in particular the utilization of multi-core and many-core architectures in personal computers and consoles are allowing large numbers of virtual agents to be incorporated into game levels in increasing numbers. We present the hybrid reciprocal velocity obstacle and optimal reciprocal collision avoidance methods for reciprocal collision avoidance and navigation in video games and described their implementations in C++ as HRVO Library and RVO2 Library. The libraries can efficiently simulate groups of twenty-five to one thousand virtual agents in dense conditions and around moving and static obstacles."