Software Reuse in Game Development : Creating Building Blocks for Prototyping

Sammanfattning: As games and the technologies used by them have become more advanced, the cost of producing games have increased. Today, the latest AAA titles are the results of hundreds or as many as thousands of people working full-time for years, and even developing a prototype requires a large investment. This project sets out to reduce that cost by looking at how reusable building blocks can be used in the prototyping process. During the project, seven interviews with game designers were conducted. The interviews found that building character controllers for the player was the most common activity and one of the more difficult tasks when prototyping a new game. As a result, a tool for creating character controllers was made. The tool builds the character controllers to work as state machines where actions in a state and transitions between states are editable through a visual programming language. The visual programming language uses nodes. These nodes work as reusable building blocks. The tool was evaluated by six game designers and four programmers who all thought the tool used a good approach for building and prototyping character controllers. The evaluation also showed that the building blocks, in the form of nodes in the tool, should be functionally small and general, like nodes for applying forces and accessing character data.