Games

What you are now reading is a unique initiative created by people who love game jams, study game jams and organise game jams. No other book like this exists. While the idea of a game jam and its predecessors can be traced back decades, the term itself is barely twenty years old, and formalised scholarship around it is not even ten. We are ecstatic to bring you the first comprehensive volume on the origins, development and contemporary practices of game jams. Within these pages, you’ll learn the game jam origins, how jams are made and where they are going.

Procedural Music Generation in Games (PMGG) can enrich the playing experience by providing both entertainment and communication to the player. We present a system that generates unique procedural thematic music for non-player characters (NPC) based on developer-defined attributes and game state. The system responds in real-time to the dynamic relationship between the player and target “boss” NPC. We create a multiplayer 2D adventure game using and evaluate the music generation system by means of user study.

Slither. io is a massively multiplayer online game in which up to 500 players control worm-like avatars and consume food to grow with the goal of becoming the largest player while avoiding running into one another. The platform serves as a good testbed for developing AI controlled agents due to its accessibility, mechanical simplicity, and unpredictability. In this paper, we develop a Slither. io bot using neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) and compare its performance to that of the best open source bot available online (a high-performing expert system bot).

2048 is a simple and intriguing sliding block puzzle game that has been studied for several years. Many complex solvers, often developed using neural nets are available and capable of achieving very high scores. We are, however, interested in using only basic heuristics, the kind that could be conceivably employed by human players without the aid of computation. A common way to implement a 2048 solver involves searching the game tree for the best moves, choosing a move and scoring the game board using some evaluation functions.

Project Panoptyk is a game engine designed to run Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games with information creation, sharing, and exchange as the central gameplay focus. This engine is a work in progress, intended to serve as a platform for simulating human/robot interaction, as well as automatic generation of game assets, quests, and real-estate. The project also aims to create an open platform allowing indie and research communities to experiment with MMO concepts.

In less than a year’s time, March 2022 will mark the twentieth anniversary of the first documented game jam, the Indie Game Jam, which took place in Oakland, California in 2002. Initially, game jams were widely seen as frivolous activities. Since then, they have taken the world by storm. Game jams have not only become part of the day-to-day process of many game developers, but jams are also used for activist purposes, for learning and teaching, as part of the experience economy, for making commercial prototypes that gamers can vote on, and more.

In story or character driven games, in-game stories are usually manually authored in advance. As the complexity of interactions in games increases, the quantity of hand-crafted text typically follows. Designing stories and composing content by hand is a laborious and time consuming process that if automated, would speed up game production and lower development costs. In this paper, we present a mixed initiative tool to help generalize and enhance context free grammars (CFGs) for story generation.

Many aspects of game jams have been studied as their popularity continues to grow. Their lingering effects on learning, motivation, and social interaction has been documented over the years. In this paper, we observe the immediate effects game jams have on participant confidence in game making skills, and preparedness, as they change over the course of the jam. We conduct surveys on three different jams held from 2016 to 2019. We collect a total of 107 surveys with 26 full sets (subjects) for the confidence questions and 17 for the preparedness.