Game programming by demonstration

Abstract

The increasing adoption of smartphones and tablets has provided tens of millions of users with substantial resources for computation, communication and sensing. The availability of these resources has a huge potential to positively transform our society and empower individuals. Unfortunately, although the number of users has increased dramatically, the number of developers is still limited by the high barrier that existing programming environments impose.To understand possible directions for helping end users to program, we present Pong Designer, an environment for developing 2D physics games through direct manipulation of object behaviors. Pong Designer is built using Scala and runs on Android tablets with the multi-touch screen as the main input. We show that Pong Designer can create simple games in a few steps. This includes (multi-player and multi-screen) Pong, Brick Breaker, Pacman, Tilting maze. We make available Pong Designer as well as several editable games that we created using it. This paper describes the main principles behind Pong Designer, and illustrates the process of developing and customizing behavior in this approach.

Languages of Games and Play

“…Examples include Tic Tac Toe, Go and Snakes and Ladders. publication query publication type research category note [91] 21n conference paper validation research [89] 57n journal article proposal of solution [90] 78n conference paper validation research publication query publication type research category note [167] 285n conference paper proposal of solution [166] 390n Maier and Volk report teaching experiences on applying DiaMeta, an EMF-based language workbench for creating visual domain-specific languages, e.g., for level editors for classic games such as PacMan and the platform game Pingus [154]. Insights include that meta-modeling has a steep learning curve and that the proposed approach speeds-up game prototyping.…”

DemoMatch: API discovery from demonstrations

“…Recent work on API discovery requires the programmer to provide either a desired type or a partial expression, both of which are hard to provide without some prior knowledge of the API [7,11,17,37]. On the other hand, recent work on programming by demonstration relies on careful design of a restricted language for possible programs as well as domain specific search procedures [9,19,38]. This approach is too restrictive for API discovery where we expect the system to work with existing frameworks and APIs.…”