Abstract-We provide a proof of principle that novel and engaging mobile casual games with new aesthetics, game mechanics and player interactions can be designed and tested directly on the device for which they are intended. We describe the Gamika iOS application which includes generative art assets; a design interface enabling the making of physics-based casual games containing multiple levels with aspects ranging from Froggerlike to Asteroids-like and beyond; a configurable automated playtester which can give feedback on the playability of levels; and an automated fine-tuning engine which searches for level parameterisations that enable the game to pass a battery of tests, as evaluated by the auto-playtester. Each aspect of the implementation represents a baseline with much room for improvement, and we present some experimental results and describe how these will guide the future directions for Gamika.
We introduce rapid game jams, a style of game jam that takes only 1-2 hours and is focused on design experimentation rather than on programming and technical implementation. To support that kind of rapid game-design experimentation, we have designed a class of games that we call fluidic games. These are mobile games in which the game mechanics and other aspects of the games are editable on the fly, directly on the device, allowing for frequent play/design context shifts. We have conducted four rapid game jams with 105 participants from a local Girlguiding organisation, in order to gain real-world experience with this concept. We analyse results from a survey instrument completed by 69 participants in two of these rapid game jams. In order to guide future work in addressing questions left open by this study, we did a qualitative analysis of the designed games to gain additional insights into participants' design practice.
The current industrial focus in virtual agents and digital games is on complex systems that more accurately simulate the real world, including cognitive characters. This trend introduces a multitude of control parameters generally accompanied by high computational costs. The resulting complexity limits the applicability of AI in these domains. One solution to this problem is to focus on lightweight flexible AI architectures which can be simultaneously generated, controlled and run in parallel. The resulting systems should then be able to control individual game characters, scaling up to large numbers of characters, forming even complex social systems. Here we contribute one element of such a system: a lightweight systems-engineering approach for enriching behaviour arbitration in action selection. Our mechanism-ERGo-improves high-level goal arbitration in existing lightweight action selection mechanisms. ERGo provides easy and reliable non-deterministic control of goal switching, activation and inhibition, allowing natural behaviour maintenance. This mechanism can aid agent design in cases where static, linear, predefined priorities are undesirable. The model underlying our approach is biomimetic, based on neuro-cognitive research on the dopaminic cells responsible for controlling goal switching and maintenance in the mammalian brain. We demonstrate and evaluate our mechanism in a real-time, game-like simulation environment, using a previously-published system as a baseline for comparison. We demonstrate that ERGo is effective, and betters the previous approach.
Pondering digital games, in general, and discussing details such as, e.g., innovations of NPC behavior and AI, of interface technologies, of serious games application areas, and the like requires a language of scientific discourse. Contributions to a taxonomy of digital games and of digital game playing are essential preliminaries to a digital games science. There is introduced a canonical taxonomy of digital games which is later on extended toward a comprehensive taxonomy of digital games. Practical work shows the usefulness of the approach whereby emphasis is put on serious games development and applications
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