Titulo Estágio
A 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 and error-prone sequential input processing loop. Petri Nets offer a visual language that has proven easy to learn by non-programmers and enables an economic and formal way of specifying behavior of complex systems of autonomous concurrent actors across diverse domains.
In previous research we have been able to use Petri Nets in game design specifications. We want to extend the use of PN as a basic language for modeling actor/agent behaviors and choreographies in game scenarios and, more generally, to generate and interpret dynamic models of interactive systems involving humans and software components.
The main idea is to use Petri Nets to model flow of control and messages among actors, symbolizing game resource availability and transference as well as choreography of audio-visual animations. PNs enable the specification of concurrent runnable actors through interactive context diagrams where actor behaviors are coded as transitions.
The main benefit of such a visual language and design tool would be the ease of learning and agile modeling and testing of runnable interactive system definitions, especially in complex cases such as videogames. It will also be tested as a behavior representation paradigm for Automatic Content Generation and Plug&Play of predefined behaviors, by reusing diagram parts and in-game interaction patterns.
Objetivo
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim at the agile prototyping of an easy to use, Petri Net based, game behavior modeling tool, supported on:
a) a graphical interface for visual modeling and game specification;
b) a PN representation for generating/exchanging actor behavior definitions;
c) a run-time interpretation engine for concurrent actor specifications.
To achieve this we will adapt an existing open source engine as well as components for Petri Net computation, and focus on designing a tool to enable drawing and generation of behavior models, for experimentation in a crowdsourcing project in game design and gameplay evaluation. Development will target Android and iOS platform portability.
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 no DEI.
Orientador
Licínio Roque
lir@dei.uc.pt 📩