Abstract
Games, MMOG-s (Massively Multiplayer On-Line Games), on-line social sites etc have become a major cultural and economic force. The main distinguishing feature and attraction of games is their interactivity – participants constantly change the state of affairs with their actions. The resulting dynamic flow of events, gameplay is like execution of an algorithm, where elementary actions are defined by game rules, but the logic, the flowchart is composed “on-the-fly” by players.
To many IT study programs have been introduced Game Programming courses. However, usually in these courses is not discussed design of games. Books on game programming and courses on this subject are based on some specific program language (C, C++), software package, pre-programmed set of classes etc, thus instead of discussing games on general they consider specific features of these programming environments and only through them also something about games. We do not have adequate formal methods for description and specification of games.
On base of analyze of several popular package s (Gamemaker, Flash AS3, Panda3D) used for programming simple, casual games here is presented a metalanguage for object-oriented, structural description of games as event-driven object- oriented systems. Specifications of games created using this language are easy to transform into implementations using some of these concrete game programming environments. This allows to present games on general abstract level, which does not depend on implementation environments. It allows to consider advantages and problems with concrete packages and to compare implementations of games in different environments. The specification method is illustrated with three examples.
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Henno, J. (2009). High-Level Specification of Games. In: Rudas, I.J., Fodor, J., Kacprzyk, J. (eds) Towards Intelligent Engineering and Information Technology. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 243. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03737-5_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03737-5_22
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