Introducing Component-Based Templates Into a Game Authoring Tool.

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Bibliographic Details
Title:	Introducing Component-Based Templates Into a Game Authoring Tool.
Authors:	Mehm, Florian¹ Florian.Mehm@kom.tu-darmstadt.de, Gobel, Stefan¹ Stefan.Goebel@kom.tu-darmstadt.de, Steinmetz, Ralf¹ Ralf.Steinmetz@kom.tu-darmstadt.de
Source:	Proceedings of the European Conference on Games Based Learning. 2011, p395-403. 9p. 1 Color Photograph, 4 Diagrams.
Subject Terms:	Educational games, Computer assisted instruction, Interactive multimedia authoring programs, Software engineering, Multimedia systems
Abstract:	Serious Games, including educational games, can be created based on various business models. Commercial Serious Game developers as well as non-professionals (teachers, employees) tasked with creating a game face significantly smaller budgets available for such games compared to games for entertainment. A use case is epitomized by a teacher investigating how he or she can create a small digital educational game for use in the classroom. The exemplified group of users does not have programming skills or experience in game development. Authoring tools for games, analogously to authoring tools in the field of e-learning, allow a non-technical expert to compose content (such as images, sounds or videos) into a game by specifying the kind of game to create and then integrating the content. An example is the authoring tool StoryTec previously presented by the authors. In this paper, an extension to the authoring tool StoryTec is described, which is intended to assist non-programmers and novices by offering specialized authoring functionality for the integration of content into gameplay templates. These templates are based on the software engineering paradigm of component-orientation, resulting in a number of rich templates that are offered to the author during the game creation workflow in order to facilitate the authoring process. They provide authoring capabilities specialized for certain highly dynamic or complex gameplay types, which would be cumbersome or impossible to author using general-purpose authoring functionalities also found in StoryTec. In further steps, the components can be augmented with more information, for example metadata about their usage in order to help authors understand them better or wizards which assist novice authors in correctly and efficiently filling out the gameplay templates. A first implementation of a gameplay template was chosen based on the analysis of the authoring process of a "city rallye"-type game which involves learning about the target city in order to advance the game. This template was implemented and the authoring effort as well as the complexity were evaluated, yielding in the result that an equivalent game (with the same content) could be authored in a smaller amount of time and with reduced complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
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Database:	Education Research Complete

Description
Abstract:	Serious Games, including educational games, can be created based on various business models. Commercial Serious Game developers as well as non-professionals (teachers, employees) tasked with creating a game face significantly smaller budgets available for such games compared to games for entertainment. A use case is epitomized by a teacher investigating how he or she can create a small digital educational game for use in the classroom. The exemplified group of users does not have programming skills or experience in game development. Authoring tools for games, analogously to authoring tools in the field of e-learning, allow a non-technical expert to compose content (such as images, sounds or videos) into a game by specifying the kind of game to create and then integrating the content. An example is the authoring tool StoryTec previously presented by the authors. In this paper, an extension to the authoring tool StoryTec is described, which is intended to assist non-programmers and novices by offering specialized authoring functionality for the integration of content into gameplay templates. These templates are based on the software engineering paradigm of component-orientation, resulting in a number of rich templates that are offered to the author during the game creation workflow in order to facilitate the authoring process. They provide authoring capabilities specialized for certain highly dynamic or complex gameplay types, which would be cumbersome or impossible to author using general-purpose authoring functionalities also found in StoryTec. In further steps, the components can be augmented with more information, for example metadata about their usage in order to help authors understand them better or wizards which assist novice authors in correctly and efficiently filling out the gameplay templates. A first implementation of a gameplay template was chosen based on the analysis of the authoring process of a "city rallye"-type game which involves learning about the target city in order to advance the game. This template was implemented and the authoring effort as well as the complexity were evaluated, yielding in the result that an equivalent game (with the same content) could be authored in a smaller amount of time and with reduced complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
ISSN:	20490992