Games

The goal to designing a game that is both educational and enjoyable can present some unique challenges. Using effective educational methods can sometimes conflict with effective design strategies for creating an enjoyable game. Kanakatana is an exploration into finding areas of overlap between foreign language learning and Role-Playing-Games. It was designed so that its most important mechanics leverage similarities between learning a new language and playing an RPG.

Escaping the Room is a design and production project that uses interactive, transmedia storytelling techniques to bring participants together into a physical space where the participants must solve a series of puzzles to “escape” from or “solve” the riddle of the space. This project is being developed between two interdisciplinary arts & engineering programs at major technical universities in the USA and Australia. The resulting escape rooms will be run simultaneously, in different countries, requiring cross-national collaboration for puzzle solving.

Providing rich narrative assets for games featuring interactive storytelling is both difficult and expensive. Of particular concern to us is the problem of believability for non-player-characters (NPC) in video games and interactive worlds. In addition to art and voice assets which can be substantial, a good NPC requires narrative assets such as universe-appropriate character background, life history, personality, speech mannerisms and behavioral peculiarities.

Audio design is an important aspect of game development which may be neglected in time-limited rapid prototyping game creation events. In such environments, members of small development teams often multitask or switch roles, but they may not possess the necessary time, resources or skills for original music compositions. In this paper, we present AUD.js, a system developed for procedural music generation for JavaScript-based web games. By taking input from game events, the system can create music corresponding to various Western perceptions of music mood.

Procedural story generation is an active and increasingly important area of interactive entertainment. Some of the most difficult challenges with the concept are generation and managing of dramatic elements with high degree of variation that are both internally consistent and entertaining. If an authoring system could access a large repository of proven sets of domain specific dramatic action sequences with guaranteed internal structure, consistency and known entertainment value, could it generate unique stories with the same drama in a different domain?

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world’s largest game development activity. Every year since 2009, thousands of computer game enthusiasts participate in this forty-eight hour challenge to make games around the same theme. While game jams, ‘hackathons’, and game festivals existed before the GGJ, and continue to proliferate, the GGJ 2009 was perhaps the first time such events were held in multiple physical spaces (23 countries) at the same time.

The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world’s largest game development activity (game jam). Every year since 2009, thousands of computer game enthusiasts participate in this forty-eight hour challenge to make games around the same theme. While game jams, hackathons, and game festivals existed before GGJ, and continue to proliferate, GGJ 2009 was perhaps the first time such events were held in multiple physical spaces (23 countries) at the same time. In this paper, we track the growth of GGJ using multiple