This report discusses the design and development of Xeero, a 3D action-puzzle- platforming game constructed from our own custom engine, original art and sound assets. Despite a small development team, we strove to create a highly-polished and marketable interactive experience. We explain the methodology employed, results gained, and challenges faced by each member of the team in pursuit of this goal.

Development of a game in the form of software for game-based learning poses significant technical challenges for educators, researchers, game designers, and software engineers. The game development consists of a set of complex processes requiring multi-faceted knowledge in multiple disciplines such as digital graphic design, education, gaming, instructional design, modeling and simulation, psychology, software engineering, visual arts, and the learning subject area. Planning and managing such a complex multidisciplinary development project require unifying methodologies for development and software quality evaluation and should not be performed in an ad hoc manner. This dissertation presents such methodologies named: GAMED (diGital educAtional gaMe dEvelopment methoDology) and IDEALLY (dIgital eDucational gamE softwAre quaLity evaLuation methodologY). GAMED consists of a body of methods, rules, and postulates and is embedded within a digital educational game life cycle. The life cycle describes a framework for organization of the phases, processes, work products, quality assurance activities, and project management activities required to develop, use, maintain, and evolve a digital educational game from birth to retirement. GAMED provides a modular structured approach for overcoming the development complexity and guides the developers throughout the entire life cycle. IDEALLY provides a hierarchy of 111 indicators consisting of 21 branch and 90 leaf indicators in the form of an acyclic graph for the measurement and evaluation of digital educational game software quality. We developed the GAMED and IDEALLY methodologies based on the experiences and knowledge we have gained in creating and publishing four digital educational games that run on the iOS (iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch) mobile devices: CandyFactory, CandySpan, CandyDepot, and CandyBot. The two methodologies provide a quality-centered structured approach for development of digital educational games and are essential for accomplishing demanding goals of game-based learning. Moreover, classifications provided in the literature are inadequate for the game designers, engineers and practitioners. To that end, we present a taxonomy of games that focuses on the characterization of games. / Ph. D.

This paper discusses the design and development of the action-puzzle-platforming game Xeero, constructed from our own custom engine, original art, and original sound assets. Despite a small development team, we strove to create a highly-polished and marketable interactive experience. This paper discusses the methodology employed, results gained, and challenges faced by each member of the team in pursuit of this goal.

Just like other artistic disciplines, animators are tasked with bringing characters to life through movement, whether for personal or professional motives. Games are a diverse field that sees a wide range of animation needs, but there lie consistent threads that lead to the success of a video games movements aesthetically and functionally. For aspiring animators there remains one consistent question: what does it mean and entail to create animation in the highly competitive game industry? This culminating experience paper aims to discuss the similarities and differences between student and professional work to highlight the importance and what it entails to work within creative restraints to create quality gameplay animation on demand. By analyzing animations, game development, and personal experience animating in different roles and scenarios, this paper seeks to highlight studio workflows, challenges, and steps to see to the success of an animation while adhering to quality and creative standards.

The existing literature provides a variety of drivers enabling rapid internationalization of born global firms. This explorative study with its inductive approach attempts to analyze to what extent born global theory can be used to understand internationalization in the context of small-sized game development firms. Five interviews of a qualitative nature are used to collect data from founders of firms in this under-researched context. The data collection process is based on an operationalization of concepts based on the three categories of founder, organizational and macro-environmental drivers. The findings show that the firms can be aligned to three different stages of their business development, from subcontracting, to game development, to self-publishing. Subcontractors are not born global, but game developers must develop games with global market potential. These firms are pushed to be international by the heavily globalized nature of their industry and digital nature of both the products and the distribution platforms. Founder and organizational factors do not drive the born global approach as much as the environment, but still play a role in explaining the business of these firms. Overall, the findings of this thesis may provide a guiding point for further research in this specific context of firms acting in an industry with immediate internationalization.

This thesis presents the implementation and functionality of the user interface for creating behavior trees in the Unreal Engine (version 4.10). The thesis analyzes the final version of the behavior trees in a game development project carried out over one year with a group ranging between four and seven members. The game which is analyzed is a third person adventure game which contains four types of simple behavior trees. These include two enemies who mainly move towards the player to attack whenever in range and two bosses with individual behavior. The thesis describes the various types of nodes available in the Unreal Engine as well as how the behavior trees in the game are structured. Focus is placed on how the structure achieves the required result and how the process resulted in the final version of the behavior trees. / Detta examensarbete beskriver implementationen och funktionaliteten av användargränssnittet för att skapa beteendeträd i Unreal Engine (version 4.10). Arbetet analyserar den slutgiltiga versionen av beteendeträden i ett spelutvecklingsprojekt som utfördes under ett år med en grupp vars antal växlade mellan fyra och sju medlemmar. Spelat som analyseras är ett tredjepersons äventyrsspel som innehåller fyra typer av grundläggande beteendeträd. Två fiender som huvudsakligen rör sig mot spelaren för att anfalla när de är inom räckhåll, och två bossar med individuella beteenden. Arbetet beskriver de olika typerna av noder tillgängliga i Unreal Engine och även hur beteendeträden i spelet är uppbyggda. Fokus läggs på hur strukturen uppnår det nödvändiga resultatet samt på hur processen resulterade i den slutgiltiga versionen av beteendeträden.

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

This project is a study on the effect on motivation when adding positive reinforcements, in the form of audiovisual rewards, to an e-learning application. Two e-learning applications (designed to teach Japanese Kanji) were created; one experimental version with audiovisual rewards (to act as positive reinforcements) and one control version without. Two groups of test subjects were gathered, one using the control version, the other using the experimental version. Using questionnaires their experiences and progress were measured, compared and analyzed. The study indicated that the experimental group learned slightly more than the control group, but that there were no difference in overall motivation between the groups.

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain.<p> Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During <i>preproduction</i>, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort.<p> During <i>production</i>, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates.<p> We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of:<p> <ol> <li>a model for the elements that compose experience requirements,</li> <li>a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and</li> <li>an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements.</li> <ol><p> Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production.

<p>This project is a study on the effect on motivation when adding positive reinforcements, in the form of audiovisual rewards, to an e-learning application. Two e-learning applications (designed to teach Japanese Kanji) were created; one <em>experimental</em> version with audiovisual rewards (to act as positive reinforcements) and one <em>control</em> version without. Two groups of test subjects were gathered, one using the control version, the other using the experimental version. Using questionnaires their experiences and progress were measured, compared and analyzed. The study indicated that the experimental group learned slightly more than the control group, but that there were no difference in overall motivation between the groups.</p>