Titulo Estágio
A Visual Language for Game Design and Choreography
Área Tecnológica
Interação com o Utilizador
Local do Estágio
CISUC
Enquadramento
Game programming is a hard and tedious task of anticipating every possible course of action we want to make available and translating that into specific code associated with objects modeled in the environment, often leading to an endless sequential input processing loop. Petri Nets are simple yet powerful visual language. It has proven to be easy to learn by non-programmers yet enables a formal way of specifying behaviors of complex systems of autonomous concurrent actors/processes across diverse domains. A brief explanation of the notation can be found online at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_net
In previous research we have been able to use Petri Nets with advantage in game design specifications and in automatic generation of in-game agent behaviors. We expect to extend their use as basic language for visual modeling of audio-visual choreographies for running game scenarios and, more generally, to create dynamic models for interactive systems involving humans and software components.
The main idea is to use colored tokens (defined on demand) to model flow of control as messages among actors, e.g. symbolizing game resource availability and transference, as well as to choreograph execution of audio-visual animations. A runnable specification would thus be the reunion of several interactive context diagrams as Petri Nets where actor behaviors are coded as transitions.
The main benefit of such a visual language and tool would be the easy of learning and agile modeling and testing of runnable interactive system definitions, especially in cases of such complexity as videogames. Plug and play of predefined behaviors by reusing diagram parts and patterns would be another design acceleration mechanism.
Objetivo
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim at the agile incremental prototyping of a proof-of-concept visual modeling language editing tool, that will generate a format to be processed by a game engine running on Android smart phones and pads as run-time interpreter.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
A1. (M1-M3) State of the art research - research and document the relevant SoA, publications and software review, for the study of the problem at hand;
A2. (M2 - M3) Detailed proposal - detailed characterization of the problem to be solved stating specific goals and requirements, assumptions and milestones for the rest of the project;
A3. (M3 - M4) Initial Design - identification of quality attributes, and architectural drivers and initial design for the proposed solution, including interaction models and user interface draft
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
A4. (M5 - M10) Prototyping - implementation and testing of a working prototype, tuning or corrections based on evaluation results
A5. (M9) Evaluation - definition of evaluation criteria and method, performance or evaluation and analysis of results
A6. (M10 - M11) Statement of Learning - production of paper/thesis with process report and reflection on knowledge production
Condições
O estágio será realizado em laboratório de investigação no DEI.
Orientador
Licinio Roque
lir@dei.uc.pt 📩