Abstract

Good documentation of the decisions made during the development of a game allows the team to work towards a shared vision and even enables future team members to learn from past mistakes. Documentation artifacts such as the game design document (GDD) exist, but research has shown that documentation is often abandoned midway through development due to time constraints. Therefore a different approach to designing games is needed. We propose a graph modeling language for game design, which can be used as a communication medium and executed in the final game.For this we show that game mechanics can be modeled as graphs and implement the proposed model based on concepts of statecharts. Graphs allow the designer to breakdown complex ideas and communicate them efficiently to the team. And due to the fact that our graph model is part of the code, it functions as always up to date documentation. Furthermore design quality metrics can be applied to graphs and provide the user with insights that help to improve the game. Future work could go one step further and generate similar graphs based on properties of an existing graph. The graph library we developed for this thesis along with examples of it in use, can be found at the following url: https://github.com/game-graphs/game-graph-library

Results/Implementation/Project Description

Conclusion

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