A End-User Programming System For Creating Adventure Games

Sammanfattning: In today’s always online, always connected world we consume more digital media than ever before. As part of this development, social media has blurred the line between producer and consumer, giving anyone with an Internet connection the opportunity to reach out to millions of users. While platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr allow any- one to be the editor of their own news channel, some forms of expression are still out of reach for the everyday user. One such medium is com- puter games, which have always required—and still do—a high level of programming skill to create. As such, games is a channel that has traditionally been out of reach for the casual content creator. The goal of this thesis is to address this issue by making the cre- ation of text-based adventure game accessible to non-programmers, as part of an initiative from Paradox Interactive. More specifically, Para- dox Interactive had the goal of empowering their writing staff to create adventure games without requiring the assistance of programmers. Through interviews and workshops with writers and other stake- holders at Paradox Interactive a set of requirements were elicited, which were complemented by analyzing the works of Joe Dever, author of the influential Lone Wolf series of gamebooks. From these requirements a series of low-fidelity prototypes were developed, which were tested and iterated upon in collaboration with users of the system. After several iterations on the prototype a final design specification was developed, which was turned into a high-fidelity software prototype. Building upon the high-fidelity prototype, a working adventure game creation software was developed.