Tuesday, April 13, 2010

An Interactive Game Design Assistant

Comments
Jill

Summary
In An Interactive Game-Design Assistant, Mark J. Nelsom and Michael Mateas present a new tool that will help users with a low budget or no development knowledge design a game. Current tools on the market today help the user with the programming and graphics side of the development process, allowing for easy libraries and visual tools to let these novices develop their own video games. But, there are currently no tools that help the user with the design process - mapping game rules to rules within the system, helping the user make their topic of interest most prominent while exploiting the useful characteristics of games. The system that the researchers created is a game-design assistant that provides suggestions or automates the process of game design, helping the developers define the space of their game in real-world and common-sense terms.

This system would work in two ways:
  • Giving feedback to the user on the state of their current design.
  • Suggesting modifications and additions in an intelligent way
It would also include example rules, layouts, story designs, and themes that the user could put together to form an abstract view of their game, allowing more detailed work in a later stage.

The user can input design constraints to the actions that the user can do in a certain situation, and the system can present a prototype of that game or give extra suggestions in that way. The picture below shows an example of specifying the relationship between an "attacker" and an "avoider."















Discussion
This seems pretty interesting that in addition to extra software that helps the user with the programming part of the process that a normal user could create an interactive game. While the game is not likely to be very intuitive or look very great, allowing a novice user to try out game development with "training wheels" could inspire them to create their own games that are more complex and do not use these helpful recommendation systems. This is similiar to "beginner" musical instruments, where the user can move on to more difficult instruments that have a greater musical range if they are interested in it.
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2 comments:

  1. Ross PetersonApril 25, 2010 at 5:50 PM

    I like the idea of providing a higher level framework above the code that allows the user to focus on aspects of the game rather than the raw coding itself.

    Like you said, this would more be a training wheels application...
    I'd like to see something with more power, personally.

    I could also see where this might limit you ability to think of game design in terms of the assistant system which could severely limit creativity.

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  2. KerryMay 8, 2010 at 3:05 PM

    I still think that having this kind of framework will help someone who has never thought about building a game actually begin implementing one. It does seem that it is a little limited on what it can do, but we also have computer science backgrounds and many may have already begun building games without any tools to help out.

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