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The best way to learn game programming is to start coding one. In this chapter, we'll build a simple card game, Crazy Eights. Crazy 8 is a popular game, both the actual card game and its electronic counterparts. If you search Google Play for Crazy Eights, it'll turn up quite a few selections.

The declarative programming of video games has not gained the interest it deserves in the computer science research community. For example, although Quasi-Engine is a Qt5-based framework that intends to be a complete multiplatform toolset to ease 2D game development, providing ready-to-use QML elements representing the basic game entities needed by most games, this project seems to be abandoned. On the commercial software side, the VPlay engine (now Felgo Engine) is a cross-platform development tool, based also on the Qt framework. Felgo developers use QML, the declarative tongue of Qt, along with an additional language required for scripting such as JavaScript or C++ to create mobile apps and games. Regarding general-purpose programming languages, to the best of my knowledge, I am not aware of any initiative out there, in Python or Ruby or any other “competing” language, that provides a standard, free, open source, and declarative game programming engine besides Ring.

We researched virtual strategies that can help engage college geology students in formal and/or informal environments. These virtual strategies were accomplished by using technological advances in photogrammetry, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs), panoramic photography, gigapixel imagery, 360° imagery, 3D mapping, 3D rendering, 3D game programming, and virtual reality. The core part of our virtual strategies is the Virtual Geology Learning Toolbox which contains virtual tools such as virtual specimens in a traditional laboratory, virtual roadcut, virtual overlook, virtual helicopter tour in 3D map platforms, and virtual field trips in 3D game worlds. We developed a virtual reality application as well and brought those tools into a more immersive virtual world. In addition to the Virtual Geology Learning Toolbox, we exploited technologies to promote active participation in traditional field trips by introducing UAS and an outdoor media sharing platform. Feedback from students and instructors is very positive, although we have faced limitations in some aspects of the technology. We predict that these limitations can be addressed as the technology develops, resulting in more powerful tools to leverage active learning in college geology.

The graphical and game programming environment provides a practical way to improve the learning process, especially the motivation of game creators. However, the research on students seldom uses graphic and game programming in higher education. Therefore, this study takes Ylands, a sandbox game of Tencent, as an example to investigate the creative thinking of higher education curriculum games and explore the factors that affect higher education’s acceptance of graphic programming. Based on FSLSM results, the students’ initial learning based on the sandbox game has different preferences for creative content. In addition, the early experience of students with a lot of game experience has become an important factor affecting students’ acceptance of sandbox and game creation. Other factors, such as self exploration ability, sense of achievement, expectation of effort, degree of realization of ideas, social influence, convenience, participation, skills and control, are also important factors. According to the results of this study, the instructional designer can control the content of sand box game creation course, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the course.

This longitudinal study investigates the impact of an extra-curricular programming workshop in student interest development in computer science. The workshop was targeted at 12–18-year old youngsters. A survey was sent to all previous participants with a known home address; 31.5% responded the survey (n = 197). This data was then combined with pre-workshop survey data, and analyzed with mixed methods. Positive development of interest was discovered for 57% of the respondents, of which nearly all attributed their interest increase to the workshop at least partly (92%). Qualitative inspection revealed that the workshop provided three anchors that facilitated students’ reengagement with programming and development of interest: disciplinary content, a concrete artifact built by students themselves, and tools. Neutral development and interest regress were also discovered, though the impact of the workshop on these interest trajectories remains unclear. peerReviewed

Game programming requirements, which is one of the problems of game programming in recent times, is constantly changing. Therefore, the process we are conducting while programming the game does not keep up with this change leads to the failure of the product we develop or the result of higher costs. Therefore, the use of agile programming, which brings a more dynamic and modern solution to changing environment conditions, is increasing day by day and the project teams are transitioning to these processes. In this thesis, firstly historical development, content, rules and methods of Agile methods are presented with literature researches. In the next section, Grumpy Ball is applied by using Scrum method which is agile programming method. Since the agile methods provide dynamic solutions, an end date cannot be determined Therefore, the aim of this article is to determine the exact date of a game application using agile method. For this reason, our project is divided into specific parts and the last periods given to these parts were compared according to certain criteria. In the light of the results, determinations were made.

We are developing a high-level synthesizable software game library to realize high performance and low power mobile terminals executing game applications. High-level synthesis, HLS, is a technology that automatically converts software into hardware. Games developed by HLS oriented game software library are executed by high-speed and low-power hardware reconfigured on reconfigurable devices in mobile terminals. This paper develops a circle drawing processing as one of functions in HLS oriented game software library. We employ Michener's algorithm which is suitable for hardware implementation as a circle drawing algorithm because it just consists of simple integer operations. We also show the program description method so that HLS tool can convert the circle drawing processing based on Michener's algorithm to a good hardware module. The experiments evaluate the execution time and the amount of hardware of the hardware module HLS generated.

Our department has long been an advocate of the functional-first school of programming and has been teaching Haskell as a first language in introductory programming course units for 20 years. Although the functional style is largely beneficial, it needs to be taught in an enthusiastic and captivating way to fight the unusually high computer science drop-out rates and appeal to a heterogeneous population of students.This paper reports our experience of restructuring, over the last 5 years, an introductory laboratory course unit that trains hands-on functional programming concepts and good software development practices. We have been using game programming to keep students motivated, and following a methodology that hinges on test-driven development and continuous bidirectional feedback. We summarise successes and missteps, and how we have learned from our experience to arrive at a model for comprehensive and interactive functional game programming assignments and a general functionally-powered automated assessment platform, that together provide a more engaging learning experience for students. In our experience, we have been able to teach increasingly more advanced functional programming concepts while improving student engagement., The authors would like to thank the precursors of the 20-year functional programming culture and FPro unit at our university, and all the instructors and TAs that have been involved in the PLab unit throughout the years. This work is financed by the ERDFs European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme within project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-006961, and by National Funds through the Portuguese funding agency, FCT s Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia as part of project UID/EEA/50014/2013.

In the last years, many didactic activities have been proposed to develop Computational Thinking (CT) skills in children and adolescents. Among these activities, the digital game programming stands out as a promising alternative considering that it is related to a familiar and motivating context for students. These initiatives are not specifically aimed at individuals with special needs such as the autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Children and adolescents with ASD usually have some limitations related to communication, cognitive flexibility, and interpersonal relationships. However, it seems natural that the skills potentially developed through game programming activities are especially beneficial for the public with ASD. In this paper, we describe the offering and evaluation of a Game Building Workshop adapted to adolescents with this condition. The guidelines used to define the workshop activities are described. An assessment based on the classroom observation and analysis of produced artifacts indicate that the participants acquired CT skills related to programming at a high level. In addition, the collaborative nature of the activities offered a stimulating and welcoming environment for individuals with ASD.

Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) allows interactive applications to be modelled in a declarative manner using time-varying values. For practical reasons, however, operational constraints are often imposed, such as having a fixed time domain, time always flowing forward, and limiting the exploration of the past. In this paper we show how these constraints can be overcome, giving local control over the time domain, the direction of time and the sampling step. We study the behaviour of FRP expressions when time flows backwards, and demonstrate how to synchronize subsystems running asynchronously and at different sampling rates. We have verified the practicality of our approach with two non-trivial games in which time control is central to the gameplay.

Automatically generating content for videogames has long been a staple of game development and the focus of much successful research. Such forays into content generation usually concern themselves with producing a specific game component, such as a level design. This has proven a rich and challenging area of research, but in focusing on creating separate parts of a larger game, we miss out on the most challenging and interesting aspects of game development. By expanding our scope to the automated design of entire games, we can investigate the relationship between the different creative tasks undertaken in game development, tackle the higher level creative challenges of game design, and ultimately build systems capable of much greater novelty, surprise, and quality in their output. This paper, the first in a series of two, describes two case studies in automating game design, proposing cooperative coevolution as a useful technique to use within systems that automate this process. We show how this technique allows essentially separate content generators to produce content that complements each other. We also describe systems that have used this to design games with subtle emergent effects. After introducing the technique and its technical basis in this paper, in the second paper in the series we discuss higher level issues in automated game design, such as potential overlap with computational creativity and the issue of evaluation.

Many types of interactive applications, including video games, raise particular challenges when it comes to testing and debugging. Reasons include de-facto lack of reproducibility and difficulties of automatically generating suitable test data. This paper demonstrates that certain variants of Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) implemented in pure functional languages can mitigate such difficulties by offering referential transparency at the level of whole programs. This opens up for a multi-pronged approach for assisting with testing and debugging that works across platforms, including assertions based on temporal logic, recording and replaying of runs (also from deployed code), and automated random testing using QuickCheck. The approach has been validated on real, non-trivial games implemented in the FRP system Yampa through a tool providing a convenient Graphical User Interface that allows the execution of the code under scrutiny to be controlled, moving along the execution time line, and pin-pointing of violations of assertions on PCs as well as mobile platforms.

This paper deals with the problem of overcoming difficulties and raising the motivation of novice engineering students studying programming. We consider this an important factor for engineering education in general and for programming of embedded devices, as well as for calculations and modeling in the field of scientific computing in particular. We present a case study on how novice engineering students can be motivated to study structured programming and coding in C using game programming in the App Inventor environment. The study is based on the authors’ practical teaching experience in the Applied Sciences University for novice programmers, with students of the Technology of Smart Devices specialty, as well as the authors’ long-time research activities in teaching Computer Science.

A computer game is one of the most efficient instructional media for improving learners’ programming skills. Implementing a game development platform or a game engine as an instruction tool provides benefits to learners. This paper observes progress in the learning process, and measures how long learners take to find solutions. The participants in the experiment were divided into two groups. The first group used traditional instructional media, such as lecturing, studying class materials, and solving assigned programming assignments. On the other hand, the second group attended the lectures, similar to the first group, and used a game development platform as instructional media to solve assigned programming assignments. The results showed that the progressive skills of the Game Development Platform learners were higher, and the problem-solving time they spent was lower.

Up to now the relationship between console games and gamers has been restricted by limitations in screen size. The gradual enlargement of these sizes has accommodated for a technological boom in the development of game software programs, some of which have been hugely successful and had broad repercussions across both the gaming and technological landscape. In 2010, Microsoft and their Kinect team released an advertisement using projection mapping technique, which gave users an exciting preview of the future of game technology and provided inspiration for aspiring young game developers. With the help of new techniques, developers had the chance to produce artistically unique projects by creating a variety of different game experiences. Additionally, the enhancement of digital games, their interactive features, and the enlargement of the screens enabled users to experience a completely new level of immersion in their games. Each new development within the industry allows for new avenues of exploration and provides the potential to further refine and enhance successful techniques. Two creative examples of application adaptations are Microsoft’s Illumiroom and RoomAlive projects, which include a game experience which incorporates a large part of the user’s physical environment using reflective techniques. The world of gaming entertainment and the technological advancements which propel it, are constantly improving the experience of its users, and this study, which starts out with aforesaid improvements, further examines the relationship between new generation interactive console games, aesthetic aspects of game interface designs, Microsoft Kinect and Projection Mapping. In light of these, this study discusses the future opportunities of console development, the current industry innovators, and the potential immersive qualities of digital games. Keywords: console game, game design, graphic design, game experience, game user interface design, projection mapping.

This article describes how game developers successfully ‘pull off’ game development, collaborating in the absence of consensus and working with recalcitrant and wilful technologies, shedding light on the games we play and those that make them, but also how we can be forced to work together by the platforms we choose to use. The concept of ‘boundary objects’ is exported from Science and Technology Studies (STS) to highlight the vital coordinating role of game development software. Rather than a mutely obedient tool, game software such as Unity 3D is depicted by developers as exhibiting magical, even agential, properties. It becomes ‘voodoo software’. This software acts as a boundary object, aligning game developers at points of technical breakdown. Voodoo software is tidied away in later accounts of game development, emphasizing how ethnographies of software development provide an anchor from which to investigate cultural production and co-creative practice.

Runtime verification is the process of observing a sequence of events generated by a running system and comparing it to some formal specification for potential violations. We show how the use of a runtime monitor can greatly speed up the testing phase of a video game under development by automating the detection of bugs when the game is being played. We take advantage of the fact that a video game, contrarily to generic software, follows a special structure that contains a “game loop.” This game loop can be used to centralize the instrumentation and generate events based on the game's internal state. We report on experiments made on a sample of six real-world video games of various genres and sizes by successfully instrumenting and efficiently monitoring various temporal properties over their execution, including actual bugs reported in the games' bug tracking database in the course of their development.

Developing a video game is a costly activity, not only from an economic perspective, but also in terms of the time devoted to researching innovative solutions and managing interfaces between the creative and technical team members. In this article, we explore the possibility to use an approach rooted into AI techniques (namely Behaviour Trees) to help establish a lingua franca between these two different functions, in order to optimize both the development time and the quality of the final product. In particular, we have developed BETTER, a middleware which can be easily embedded into any game engine, and tested it during the design and development of Crazy-Hill, a commercial video game for iOS-based mobile devices.

Interest towards implementing educational gaming into courses within higher education continues to increase, but it requires extensive amounts of resources to create individual games for each course. This paper is a description of a university’s effort to create a custom educational game engine to streamline the game development process within the university. This paper includes a discussion of the institutional effort, the game engine itself, as well as a case study of a game created with the custom FLAG (an HTML5 game engine built to run 2D games on any HTML5 compatible device) game engine to illustrate how the FLAG engine can simplify the game development process and promote game-based learning in higher education.

This paper presents an online, web-based Serious Game developed to investigate end-user behaviour when faced with complex WDS design and rehabilitation problems. SeGWADE (Serious Game for WDS Analysis, Design & Evaluation) couples an innovative and visually attractive interactive front-end with a server-side modelling engine handling real-time hydraulic simulation. A multiplayer online game infrastructure is implemented allowing interactions with a model to be instantly broadcast to both collaborating and competing users. The interactions are recorded and can be subsequently be replayed or analysed through the interface to explore the decision making process in detail. The Serious Game engine is designed to be extensible and can be reconfigured dynamically through an interface allowing the upload of EPANET [1] input files and the parameterisation of different game scenarios permitting a range of games to be developed independently. In addition, the front-end employs adaptive graphics that can switch between HTML5 canvas or WebGL rendering technologies, depending on the client hardware capabilities, in order to deliver the best user experience. The serious game has been evaluated through a classroom-based exercise in which 20 students competed to obtain the best WDS design solution. The results obtained demonstrate a high degree of player engagement with the game.

Game developers make heavy use of "metrics" (or "analytics") in order to understand how their games are being played by the public. Through recording players' actions within a game, designers can identify weaknesses in the game design, such as sections of the game that are too difficult, or never explored. Meanwhile, a genre of “scientific games” has emerged, in which players contribute to the advancement of science through their actions in a game, learn scientific concepts, or both. Although most scientific games incorporate metrics, the data is meant only for the developers and is rarely shared with the public. This represents a missed opportunity for the public to learn from the data that they and their fellow players are generating.Inspired by the belief that anyone can contribute to science, we have created an open source game analytics service called "RedMetrics" in which all data gathered is freely and immediately available online. RedMetrics can gather data from any platform (web, PC, console, etc.) and stores it on an open repository. The data is available via a web API as well as a web application. To ease integration, we provide interfaces for the popular game engine Unity as well as for the web browser.In this paper, we demonstrate RedMetrics through a case study of Hero.Coli, a game to learn synthetic biology. We study the progression of players through the game and use RedMetrics to identify bottlenecks in the game design that hinder learning.

U ovom radu vidjeli smo kako funkcionira SFML. To je C++ biblioteka koja omogućava programiranje dvodimenzionalnih računalnih igara. SFML nudi razne mogućnosti u razvoju igara koje su ponuđene preko 5 glavnih modula, a to su sustav, prozor, grafika, zvuk i mreža. S njima možemo crtati po zaslonu, upravljati likom i ostalim dijelovima programa, puštati zvukove i igrati preko mreže. Sve te mogućnosti dovode do toga da možemo programirati kvalitetne i komplicirane igre. Kako bi taj kod bio pregledan i održiv, koristimo oblikovne obrasce. Oni su isprobane metode organiziranja koda koje dovode do toga da je kvalitetnije napisan. Bez njih bi kodove s velikim brojem linija bilo teško čitati i održavati. Oni daju višu razinu apstrakcije kodu. Na kraju smo vidjeli kako implementirati jednu igru u SFML-u. Pri tome smo koristili njegove module i oblikovne obrasce. Na tome primjeru vide se mogućnosti SFML-a i zašto su korisni obrasci. Također su korištene neke standardne prakse pri programiranju igara koje olakšavaju organizaciju i dodavanje novih dijelova igre. In this paper, we have seen the capabilities of SFML. It is a C++ library that allows us to program two-dimensional video games. SFML offers different possibilities when developing games and they are offered through 5 main modules, these are system, window, graphics, sound and network. We can use them to draw on the screen, manipulate the character and other parts of the game, play sounds and play over a network. All those possibilities give us the option to develop high quality complex games. To make that code readable and sustainable, we use design patterns. They are tried and tested methods of organizing code that leads to it being written better. Without them, codes that have many lines would be difficult to read and maintain. They provide a higher level of abstraction to the code. Finally, we saw how to implement a game in SFML. While doing so, we used its modules and design patterns. That example showed the capabilities of SFML and usefulness of design patterns. Some standard game programming practices have also been used which facilitate the organization and addition of new parts to the game.

In this paper, we argue for the need of new kinds of visual, digital game authoring tools. The main goal for this project is to reconceptualization the programming of interactive digital contents, to minimize the coding aspects, and focus instead on the creative and design-like parts, leveraging on a tangible metaphor, so to empower teachers and pupils to create digital interactive content, expanding the creative affordances offered by digital games. The resulting tool is called Stick&Click, it is based on findings from our past research, and it targets the pedagogical practice of editing games that is currently common in Danish primary schools. The study is organized according to the research through design approach, and centers around user needs and experience. We discuss our explorations of the computational model behind Stick&Click, requirements and design principles, and alternative ways to visualize its user interface. In this paper, we argue for the need of new kinds of visual, digital game authoring tools. The main goal for this project is to reconceptualization the programming of interactive digital contents, to minimize the coding aspects, and focus instead on the creative and design-like parts, leveraging on a tangible metaphor, so to empower teachers and pupils to create digital interactive content, expanding the creative affordances offered by digital games. The resulting tool is called Stick&Click, it is based on findings from our past research, and it targets the pedagogical practice of editing games that is currently common in Danish primary schools. The study is organized according to the research through design approach, and centers around user needs and experience. We discuss our explorations of the computational model behind Stick&Click, requirements and design principles, and alternative ways to visualize its user interface.

We have developed and piloted a method that can be used to create planning and learning environments that fuse buildings design with game programming. The method also allows e.g. to design and different simulations of building usage (like emergency evacuation by rescue teams). The method also brings together the students of game programming and buildings design with building users and construction professionals to work together towards mutual goals. This way they all learn in addition to group work to act in projects with students, building users and professionals of many disciplines. This is increasingly a key skill in the modern work life that relies heavily on projects. In this environment it is important for the actors to learn how to understand and appreciate the specialists of other disciplines and their professional skills. The gamified information model of a building can be used after its completion as a learning and testing space for the construction professionals. In the gamification we utilize our patented Functional Design Method for Buildings that enables to take into account the space needed for human actions in buildings or other targets under design in information model based (BIM) design of buildings. The objects to be dimensioned could e.g. be related to safety, loading and unloading areas or production processes and their requirements for space. An inverse approach is also possible. The method helps all actors of construction business, building users and students to better take into account and understand operational spatial requirements in a building and about safety.

The use of pure functional languages for interactive applications, especially mobile applications and games, is still rare. Reasons include the lack of libraries and frameworks that implement necessary features, poor integration with existing toolchains, and the lack of examples that demonstrate how to best structure large interactive applications in a way that is scalable in terms of performance and modularity. In this paper we identify three specific challenges that limit the application of functional programming specifically to mobile apps and games: purity, compositionality, and abstraction. We discuss solutions to these problems, and propose a framework for mobile app programming that completely separates logic from IO, resulting in an architecture that is referentially transparent, modular, scalable, backend agnostic and trivial to test. We implement this proposal in FAWN, a collection of libraries that provide higher-level notions needed in commercial applications, like resource management, widgets, storing user preferences, audio playing, image rendering, and composable applications. We have verified the suitability of this approach by using it to build, in Haskell, six mobile games for iOS and Android.

In software applications, code smells are considered as bad coding practices acquired at the time of development. The presence of such code smells in games may affect the process of game development adversely. Our preliminary study aims at investigating the existence of code smells in the games. To achieve this, we used JavaScript code smells detection tool JSNose against 361 JavaScript web games to find occurrences of JavaScript smells in games. Further, we conducted a manual study to find violations of known game programming patterns in 8 web games to verify the necessity of game-specific code smells detection tool. Our results shows that existing JavaScript code smells detection tool is not sufficient to find game-specific code smells in web games.

In collaborative development of games software, hotspot identification technique significantly supports maintenance and evolutions activities including modding because newly involved developers must identify hotspot. This paper focuses on game loops as hotspots because many action games, including classic action games and the latest action games for console game machines, have an architecture consisting of game loops and update functions. This study assumes that game loops and update functions have the largest number of function calls in the entire source code modules. This paper investigates whether call flow analysis helps developers identify hotspots in four games software publicly accessible in GitHub. The results of the investigation revealed that one game loop and a set of update functions could be identified precisely by call flow analysis and that other three neighborhood functions could be identified. The results showed the possibility of automated identification of game loop and update functions by call flow analysis.

Video game programming is an area where code duplication is extremely prevalent. Similar types of tasks are performed in multiple places throughout a game engine codebase. For example: game balance, logging, and memory allocation are just a few of the areas which are located across disparate locations of the codebase. Meanwhile, aspect oriented programming (AOP) was created to make use of common themes in a codebase and allow for advice to be given during compilation or runtime. GAMESPECT is a Domain Specific language (DSL) which resides in a higher level language space, above the typical languages used by game engines such as Unreal Engine 4. The language is written with the popular XText language toolset and contains advices in the spirit of aspect oriented programming: point cuts and join points. These advices can be executed at runtime when the programmer wants to finetune values or perform debugging. The advising is made possible through the Clang toolchain. Unique to this approach, GAMESPECT takes a source language and converts into multiple target languages. Depending on the context, GAMESPECT can generate C++, LUA, Blueprints or Skookum Script. This type of source to source translation is made possible through GAMESPECT’s “composition specifications”. With GAMESPECT, video game designers can increase their productivity and reduce the required lines of code for certain tasks by a 9–40% reduction. In addition, it provides for an AOP platform which is agnostic to the underlying game code. The applicability of this approach extends beyond game programming into software engineering as a whole.

The use of games in education has become an increasingly present practice in contemporary society. For so-called "digital natives", learning through electronic games becomes more significant. Digital educational games are often seen as boring, non-motivational, that fail to bring in some essential elements that promote engagement, making the learning goal is not achieved either. Game Design is a game project. It describes how the game should be, defining its mechanics and interactions between player and thevirtual world of the game and how they can affect the game environment. In order to document the design of a game, there is the Game Design Document (GDD), whose one of the main objectives, besides registration, is to help in communication between the different production teams of a game, allowing the game designer a broad view of that is being produced. However, because it is a large document that brings in detail all the main elements for the production of a game, it turns out to be little used, especially if the focus is the elaboration of small games, which are the majority of the digital educational games that exist. For these short games, which can often be worked out within a few hours, there are Short Game Design Document (SGDD). The SGDD, unlike GDD, will describe the elements of the game in a simplified way possible, whereas the game to be drawn from it is also a simple game. Thus, the proposal of this work is to elaborate a model of SGDD for educational games (the SGDDEdu), specifying elements of art, sound, mechanics and game programming, as well as educational elements in accordance with the new BNCC (National Curricular Common Base) of Elementary School, so that there is a standardization and better categorization of educational games aligned with the proposed pedagogical objectives and the skills and competences described in each level of education. This work will be developed from the study and analysis of some models of already existing SGDD and the BNCC of Elementary School in general, causing in SGDDEdu. The research will be applied with teachers and educators requesting that they specify an educational game in the SGDDEdu template. With this, we intend to verify if the SGDDEdu has relevance and if it facilitates in the production of digital educational games, providing the teaching and learning process through the games, as well as trying to identify how the NCCB can contribute in the development of educational games

Nowadays, researchers are looking for ways to adapt education to include technology and more engaging methods. For computer science courses, the use of problem-based learning, virtual tutors, learning style personalization and game programming are possible ways to achieve this goal. In this context, this work proposes and evaluates an approach to generate different kinds of virtual tutors (with various levels of interaction) for problem-based game programming classes. The system was evaluated in an experiment where two types of virtual tutors were proposed and generated considering two virtual game programming classes. Results showed that the use of virtual tutors promoted efficient learning and that the availability of different kinds of tutors can optimize individual engagement.

Short-term outreach interventions are conducted to raise young students’ awareness of the computer science (CS) field. Typically, these interventions are targeted at K–12 students, attempting to encourage them to study CS in higher education. This study is based on a series of extra-curricular outreach events that introduced students to the discipline of computing, nurturing creative computational thinking through problem solving and game programming. To assess the long-term impact of this campaign, the participants were contacted and interviewed two to five years after they had attended an outreach event. We studied how participating in the outreach program affected the students’ perceptions of CS as a field and, more importantly, how it affected their educational choices. We found that the outreach program generally had a positive effect on the students’ educational choices. The most prominent finding was that students who already possessed a “maintained situational interest” in CS found that the event strengthened their confidence in studying CS. However, many students were not affected by attending the program, but their perceptions of CS did change. Our results emphasize the need to provide continuing possibilities for interested students to experiment with computing-related activities and hence maintain their emerging individual interests.

We introduce the General Video Game Rule Generation problem, and the eponymous software framework which will be used in a new track of the General Video Game AI (GVGAI) competition. The problem is, given a game level as input, to generate the rules of a game that fits that level. This can be seen as the inverse of the General Video Game Level Generation problem. Conceptualizing these two problems as separate helps breaking the very hard problem of generating complete games into smaller, more manageable subproblems. The proposed framework builds on the GVGAI software and thus asks the rule generator for rules defined in the Video Game Description Language. We describe the API, and three different rule generators: a random, a constructive and a search-based generator. Early results indicate that the constructive generator generates playable and somewhat interesting game rules but has a limited expressive range, whereas the search-based generator generates remarkably diverse rulesets, but with an uneven quality., Comment: 8 pages, 9 listings, 1 table, 2 figures

Bu tez çalışması Pamukkale Üniversitesi Bilimsel Araştırma Projeleri Koordinasyon Birimi (PAUBAP) tarafından 2018FEBE003 nolu proje ile desteklenmiştir. Oyun geliştirim süreci, her geçen gün daha ayrıntılı bir yapıya sahne olmaktadır. Kapsamlı bir bilişim teknolojisi olan yapay zekâ uygulamaları, oyun teknolojilerini de yakından etkilemiştir. Her geçen gün artan etkileyici çalışmaların başında gelmektedir. Bu çalışmada ise 2 boyutlu bir platform oyununun seviyeleme işlemleri incelenmiştir. Renga, çalışmada kullanılan ve tez için tasarlanmış bir oyun olup, basit bir oynanışa sahiptir. Oyun verileri, elde edilen oynanış ve kullanıcı bilgileri ile yapay sinir ağları modeli, en yakın k-komşu, rassal orman ve derin öğrenme yöntemleri ile işlenmiştir. Çıkan sonuçlar, yapılan sınıflama işlemi, bir sonraki oyun bölümüne yönelik, seviyeleme için kullanılabilecek sonuçlar sunmaktadır. Böylelikle geliştiricilerin, oyun kullanıcıları için, oyuna göre sunabileceği en verimli oynanabilirlik algısı şekillenecektir. Bir oyunu oynanabilir kılan en önemli özellik ise zorluktur. Her kullanıcının farklı oyun becerilerine sahip olması, her oyuncuya farklı zorluk sunumunun bir gereklilik olduğunu ortaya çıkaracaktır. Bu çalışma dinamik verilerle hesap edilen zorluğun, genel bir kullanıcı kitlesine göre şekillenebilirliğini Renga üzerinde sağlamaktır. Bu sayede yeni bölümler, varlıkların, bu kullanıcılara özel değerleriyle oluşturulacaktır. Kullanıcıya en verimli oyun tecrübesi aktarılmış olacaktır. The game development process is becoming a more detailed structure every day. The applications of artificial intelligence (AI), which is a comprehensive information technology, have been closely related to game technologies. In this project, the levelling process of a 2- dimensional (2D) platform game was investigated. The game called “Renga” has a basic gameplay and had developed for this work. Game data was processed through an artificial neural network (ANN), k nearest neighbour, random forest algorithms and deep learning model that is trained with gameplay and user information. The classification process with the output data provides results for the next game section and level. In this way, the most effective playability impression that the developers offer to the game users is created according to game. The most important feature that makes a game playable is difficulty. The fact that each user has a different game skill requires each player to have a game with different difficulty. In this project, the variety of difficulty calculated with dynamic data by the user is provided by Renga, in which new sections/levels are created with user-specific assets. Thus, the most efficient gaming experience has been transfered to the users.

This chapter shows how to design a game state manager. Often, games will have a title screen, menus for options, menus for selecting different levels, screens to display the high score after finishing a level, a menu to select different characters and attributes, and so on. A game state manager can help switching between these states seamlessly. We will show how different states can be a part of the game loop and how we can switch between them. For that, we design a generic game loop interface that defines the structure of all objects that are part of the game loop in some way.

In the wider perspective of narrowing down some of the gaps that prevent the adoption of declarative logic programming within highly dynamically changing environments, we focus in this paper on the context of integrating reasoning modules in real-time videogames. Integrating rule-based AI within the commercial game development life-cycle poses a number of unsolved challenges, each with non-obvious solution. For instance, it is necessary to cope with strict time performance requirements; the duality between procedural code and declarative specifications prevents easy integration; the concurrent execution of reasoning tasks and game updates requires proper information passing strategies between the two involved sides. In this work we illustrate our recent progress on how to embed rule-based reasoning modules into the well-known Unity game development engine. To this end, we report about ThinkEngine, a framework in which a tight integration of declarative formalisms within the typical game development workflow is made possible. We prove the viability of our approach by developing a proof-of-concept Unity game that makes use of ASP-based AI modules.

This work seeks to understand the formative process of Basic Education students in addition to the usual math classroom practices, involving the production of digital games and their use with Parkinson's patients. This initiative was carried out within the Mathematics Extension Project of the Goiano Federal Institute, Advanced Ipameri Campus, in a public school in the metropolitan region of Goiania, guided by qualitative research. The data produced were analyzed from elements of the Construction and Learning Turbulence identified in the activities mobilized beyond the social and human aspects fabricated throughout the student's formation. The results obtained with the data analysis indicate elements of the created environment that act as context and motor for the production of meanings in mathematics by the students, evidencing the relevance of a contextualized and active formation. Este trabalho busca compreender o processo formativo de alunos da Educação Básica para além das práticas usuais de sala de aula de matemática, envolvendo a produção de jogos digitais e seu uso com pacientes de Parkinson. Tal iniciativa foi realizada no âmbito do Projeto de extensão Mattics, do Instituto Federal Goiano, Campus Avançado Ipameri, em uma escola pública da região metropolitana de Goiânia, norteada pela pesquisa qualitativa. Os dados produzidos foram analisados a partir de elementos do Construcionismo e do Turbilhão de Aprendizagem identificados nas atividades mobilizadas além dos aspectos sociais e humanos tecidos ao longo da formação do aluno. Os resultados obtidos com a análise de dados indicam elementos do ambiente criado que atuam como contexto e motor para a produção de significados em matemática pelos alunos, evidenciando a relevância de uma formação contextualizada e atuante. Este trabalho busca compreender o processo formativo de alunos da Educação Básica para além das práticas usuais de sala de aula de matemática, envolvendo a produção de jogos digitais e seu uso com pacientes de Parkinson. Tal iniciativa foi realizada no âmbito do Projeto de extensão Mattics, do Instituto Federal Goiano, Campus Avançado Ipameri, em uma escola pública da região metropolitana de Goiânia, norteada pela pesquisa qualitativa. Os dados produzidos foram analisados a partir de elementos do Construcionismo e do Turbilhão de Aprendizagem identificados nas atividades mobilizadas além dos aspectos sociais e humanos tecidos ao longo da formação do aluno. Os resultados obtidos com a análise de dados indicam elementos do ambiente criado que atuam como contexto e motor para a produção de significados em matemática pelos alunos, evidenciando a relevância de uma formação contextualizada e atuante.

Deterioration modelling of ageing phenomena on materials is an actively researched topic in computer graphics and vision, with a wide range of applications in domains such as cultural heritage, game programming, material science and virtual reality. As a result significant progress has been accomplished and existing methods are able to produce visually pleasing results that appear realistic. However, there is a very limited connection to comprehensive measurements that actually capture the ageing process of a material. This paper focuses on this gap, aiming to provide a link between physical measurements and deterioration modelling. Based on extensive measurements of texture and surface geometry of artificially aged reference materials, a Deep Learning (DL) framework is proposed that models spatio-temporal variations on the 3D surface geometry and the 2D colour–image appearance. Concretely, the problem of material degradation over time is formulated as an 2D/3D material-to-material translation problem, where the goal is, given an input material and a target degradation time, to output the degraded material at that time. At the core of the method lies a modified conditional Generative Adversarial Network (cGAN), which maps input materials to degraded materials over time. In order to train and deploy the proposed cGAN model, proper data parameterization and augmentation steps are introduced. As shown through extensive experimentation on real data coming from materials commonly found in artwork and from actual artworks, the proposed approach produces high quality results.

The development of digital games over physical distance is a common practice in the gaming industry, yet widely neglected in the curricula of digital game development programs at university level. The coronavirus pandemic, however, pushed project-oriented game programs all over the world towards an implementation of ad hoc approaches to remote development in their project-based courses. The present article demonstrates practice-based research examining such a course and its 30 third-year undergraduate students of game arts, game design, and game programming, who remotely collaborated in interdisciplinary groups of two to five persons over the course of half a semester during Germany’s logdown in spring 2020. Applying a mixed-method approach including quantitative and qualitative analyses of survey data (n=22) and qualitative content analyses of students’ postmortem documentations (n=30), this exploratory study reconstructed the online practices, experiences, and learning processes of these students between their professional routines and psychosocial challenges. The results of this study can be used in curriculum development to inform the advancement of courses focused on the development of prototypes over physical distance, which may not only be relevant for the field of games education, but also for related creative and project-oriented fields of higher education, such as design, digital media, and software engineering.

The purpose of this study is to investigate and suggest nonviolent, emotionally and helpful games for young people. In this paper, the digital animation, advantages, disadvantages, production process, etc. for overseas trends were defined. Also, creating games with the Visual Basic language in the animated feature of the disadvantages of existing algorithms shows case and screen time, so delayed distortion appears respectively. The proposed algorithm improves the speed and distortion through the screen. Simply two games of in-game animation and animation in complex game features were designed for the experiment and showed the superiority of the proposed algorithm by running. In this paper, the user interface of the game for children and proposed relevant algorithms were designed and resultant screens of the game showed. Most of contemporary games are violent to children. Therefore, in order to solve such problems, the game which is not violent but educative and child-friendly was designed and implemented in this paper. The future study on the game with a more in-depth is needed for animation techniques.

This paper presents a cultural entertainment game entitled “Rota do Tropeiro”. The aim of our article is to briefly present well-known tools that can be integrated and used by beginners to develop games with quality and optimized performance, especially for the Android platform. The document describes our game prototype, showing techniques and methodologies applied and highlighting new challenges. As a result, we produced a mobile game for end-users, and creative stuffs like animations, geometric models and artificial intelligence scripts.

Computer game is a result of integration of various academic areas, and the production of computer game requires knowledge and experience from various areas. This study demonstrates a game production process using Scratch. The intent was to experience the game development process and the production principle through actually building the core functions of a game using Scratch. As such, the computer game production principle was understood and it was made possible to learn more easily and more enjoyably the functions of multimedia and programming necessary for the production process. As the result, the learning of game production principles using Scratch was found to enhance the interest of the learner, and help with the understanding of game structure and learning software/programming language.Key Words :Game Development, Game Project, Game Education, Educational Games, Serious Game, Scratch * 본 논문은 2015 년도 광운대학교 교내 학술연구비 지원에 의해 연구되었음Received 26 March 2016, Revised 22 April 2016Accepted 20 May 2016, Published 28 May 2016Corresponding Author: Hyung-Won Jong(Department of Information & Contents, Kwangwoon University)Email: hwjung@kw.ac.krⒸThe Society of Digital Policy & Management. All rightsreserved. This is an open-access article distributed under theterms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-CommercialLicense (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0), whichpermits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided the original work isISSN: 1738-1916 properly cited.

The educational computer game service, due to its entertainment role, is a very attractive tool for students to raise their interests in learning. Especially mathematics, the most difficult subject for many students, is one of the typical subjects in which the educational computer game service can be efficiently applied. Most of the previous game services is for single or two learners. And learner only have to simply submit a solution for the proposed math expression in the game. In this paper a multi-player game service based on TCP/IP socket programming technique is designed and implemented to join in the game for multiple learners. In addition, we design a game rule to improve learners` number sense by letting them arrange various ways to solve the problem. Finally, using the requirements of educational game service, we evaluate the proposed game service and its usability.

To really exploit the full potential of computer games in areas other than entertainment, it will be necessary to reduce the high cost associated with their design and development and to put their production directly into the hands of the domain experts. Although these experts might be interested in integrating games in their activities, they normally do not have the required technical background to create or adapt games to their needs. We propose to tackle the complexity of game design, and thereby facilitate end user design, by defining the games as a combination of more simple games following a combinatorial creativity approach. This approach does not impose the cognitive overload of learning a new design language. In addition, it might also speed up the description of the games insofar as designers do not start from scratch, trying to match their ideas with game components, but they rely upon a set of archetypical games they can combine to reach their goals. The design technique is complemented with a game platform that offers a set of authoring tools for describing game designs that can be exported to XML files, and a game engine able to interpret such files and automatically generate a 3D virtual environment in which the games can be played. In this way, designers can envision games they will be able to design in an iterative way and play the games they design to assess their validity. The proposed combinatorial approach has been evaluated in two focus group experiences that validate its feasibility and acceptability both by technical and non-technical users.