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Facilitating language-oriented game development by the help of language workbenches

Published: 03 November 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In recent years, a strong tendency towards language-oriented engineering became visible within game development projects. This approach is typically based on data-driven game engines and scripting languages resp. editing tools alike and already provided a great deal of overall productivity improvements. However, in its current form, potential benefits are not able to fully unfold yet. This is due to a mostly manual tool development process, which provokes substantial costs and lacks flexibility -- especially during prototyping phases of development. Language workbenches seem to be a viable solution to this problem as they promise the ability of (visual) language (re-)generation by introducing a meta-level of development. This paper picks up that idea and evaluates its application in the area of game development. In this particular case, we discuss first findings of an ongoing case study, covering the development of level editors for several classic games, which have been built by the help of a language workbench.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
Future Play '08: Proceedings of the 2008 Conference on Future Play: Research, Play, Share
November 2008
297 pages
ISBN:9781605582184
DOI:10.1145/1496984
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 03 November 2008

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Author Tags

  1. (visual) domain-specific languages
  2. game development
  3. game prototyping
  4. language workbenches
  5. model-driven development
  6. software factories

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FuturePlay08
FuturePlay08: FuturePlay 2008 Academic Games Conference
November 3 - 5, 2008
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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Cited By

View all
  • (2018)Ontology-Based Domain Analysis for Model Driven Pervasive Game DevelopmentInformation10.3390/info90501099:5(109)Online publication date: 3-May-2018
  • (2018)RAIL: A Domain-Specific Language for Generating NPC Behaviors in Action/Adventure GameAdvances in Computer Entertainment Technology10.1007/978-3-319-76270-8_58(868-881)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2018
  • (2015)A Flexible Model-Driven Game Development ApproachProceedings of the 2015 IX Brazilian Symposium on Components, Architectures and Reuse Software10.1109/SBCARS.2015.24(130-139)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2015
  • (2015)A Workflow for Model Driven Game DevelopmentProceedings of the 2015 IEEE 19th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference10.1109/EDOC.2015.23(94-103)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2015
  • (2015)An Evaluation of an Enhanced Model Driven Approach for Computer Game CreationEnterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling10.1007/978-3-319-19237-6_32(499-508)Online publication date: 27-May-2015
  • (2011)How to integrate domain-specific languages into the game development processProceedings of the 8th International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology10.1145/2071423.2071475(1-8)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2011

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