Com a disseminação das tecnologias interativas, a crescente produção e o consumo de jogos digitais mudou a forma como as pessoas se divertem, se relacionam e adquirem conhecimentos. Reconhecidos como um dos principais produtos da indústria criativa, os jogos têm a capacidade, não só de entreter, mas de educar e ensinar de uma forma envolvente e prazerosa. O principal desafio, no entanto, encontra-se na construção desses jogos. Os títulos produzidos pela indústria do entretenimento não tem a preocupação de proporcionar qualquer tipo de aprendizado, enquanto que aqueles voltados ao ensino carecem de um formato mais atraente e sedutor. Neste contexto, a presente pesquisa busca analisar esse paradigma, identificando as potencialidades e deficiências de ambos os perfis de games, e apontar diretrizes de projeto para o design e produção de jogos, que possam aliar o foco instrucional ao formato sedutor. / With interactive technologies dissemination, the growing of videogames production and consuming changed the way of interpersonal relationships and they acquisition of knowledge. Recognized as one of main products from creative industry, videogames have the power of educate and teach in an immersive and pleasurable way. The main challenge, however, resides in the construction of these games. The top titles produced by entertainment industry don’t care about any kind of learning. In other hand, learning videogames, lack an attractive a seductive shape. In this context, the current research seeks to analyze this paradigm, identifying the potentialities and deficiencies of both kinds of games, determining project guidelines for videogames design and production, allying the educational focus to the seductive format.

Com a disseminação das tecnologias interativas, a crescente produção e o consumo de jogos digitais mudou a forma como as pessoas se divertem, se relacionam e adquirem conhecimentos. Reconhecidos como um dos principais produtos da indústria criativa, os jogos têm a capacidade, não só de entreter, mas de educar e ensinar de uma forma envolvente e prazerosa. O principal desafio, no entanto, encontra-se na construção desses jogos. Os títulos produzidos pela indústria do entretenimento não tem a preocupação de proporcionar qualquer tipo de aprendizado, enquanto que aqueles voltados ao ensino carecem de um formato mais atraente e sedutor. Neste contexto, a presente pesquisa busca analisar esse paradigma, identificando as potencialidades e deficiências de ambos os perfis de games, e apontar diretrizes de projeto para o design e produção de jogos, que possam aliar o foco instrucional ao formato sedutor. / With interactive technologies dissemination, the growing of videogames production and consuming changed the way of interpersonal relationships and they acquisition of knowledge. Recognized as one of main products from creative industry, videogames have the power of educate and teach in an immersive and pleasurable way. The main challenge, however, resides in the construction of these games. The top titles produced by entertainment industry don’t care about any kind of learning. In other hand, learning videogames, lack an attractive a seductive shape. In this context, the current research seeks to analyze this paradigm, identifying the potentialities and deficiencies of both kinds of games, determining project guidelines for videogames design and production, allying the educational focus to the seductive format.

Balancing is usually done in the later phases of creating a game to make sure everything comes together to an enjoyable experience. Most of the time balancing is done with a series of playthroughs by the designers or by outsourced play testers and the imbalances found are corrected followed by more playthroughs. This method occupies a lot of time and might therefore not find everything. In this study I use information gathered from interviews with experienced designers and designer texts along with features from methods frequently used for aiding the designers to make a conceptual design of a tool that is aimed towards simplifying the process of balancing and reducing the amount of work hours having to be spent on this phase.

There is a lack of maturity in the software game development that results in development companies using their own invented, but not fully completed, procedures. Through a case study this master thesis gives an overview of the game developers maturity in configuration management, quality assurance and development methods in general. It also presents a suggestion on how to address the issues found in the case study. / Datorspelsindustrin är en omogen bransch vilket medför att företagen använder sig av icke kommersiella metoder och processer för utveckling. Magisterarbetets fallstudie ger läsaren en överblick av spelföretags mognadsnivå inom några delar av utvecklingsprocessen. Dessutom presenterar magisterarbetet råd för att förbättra de brister som har blivit definierade under fallstudien. / Questions about the master thesis can be sent to Peter Kullgard (kullgard@hotmail.com) or Richard Hultgren (richie@pc.nu) Special thanks to Martin Walfisz and Massive Entertainment of Sweden

This master thesis discusses three different parts of adventure game development. The first part is about the usage of existing development environments; which one we selected and how we selected it. The second part discusses the development of the game using the selected development environment from the first part. The third and last part discusses the benefits from using skilled story writers when developing an adventure game. In this work the story writers were students from the English Department at Blekinge Institute of Technology.

Context. Game development is a costly process and with today's advanced hardware the customers are asking for more playable content, and at higher quality. For many years providing this content procedurally has been done for level creation, modeling, and animation. However, there are games that require content in other forms, such as executable quests that progress the game forward. Quests have been procedurally generated to some extent, but not in enough detail to be usable for game development without providing a handwritten description of the quest. Objectives. In this study we combine a procedural content generation structure for quests with a natural language generation approach to generate a descriptive summarized text for quests, and examine whether the resulting texts are viable as quest prototypes for use in game development. Methods. A number of articles on the area of natural language generation is used to determine an appropriate way of validating the generated texts produced in this study, which concludes that a user case study is appropriate to evaluate each text for a set of statements. Results. 30 texts were generated and evaluated from ten different quest structures, where the majority of the texts were found to be good enough to be used for game development purposes. Conclusions. We conclude that quests can be procedurally generated in more detail by incorporating natural language generation. However, the quest structure used for this study needs to expand into more detail at certain structure components in order to fully support an automated system in a flexible manner. Furthermore due to semantics and grammatics being key components in the flow and usability of a text, a more sophisticated system needs to be implemented using more advanced techniques of natural language generation.

Abstract The focus of this thesis is to study a way to create deeper open world experiences. As our technology evolves and our computers, phones and consoles get more powerful, we now have the ability to create huge open worlds in digital games. The purpose is to gain insight how to make this open world interesting for the player to “play” in this world. For this study I want to study a game that uses an open world level design where the players can roam freely around without constraints stopping them. I to create part of this world and get the players to understand where they are without a map, and give them one experience that makes them want to come back. Keywords: Open world, Digital Games, Level Design, Experience, Game Development Abstrakt Mitt fokus med detta kandidatarbete är att studera hur man kan skapa en djupare öppen värld upplevelse. Idag när våra datorer, telefoner och konsoler blir allt starkare så har vi nu möjligheten att skapa stora öppna världar i digitala spel. Syftet med detta är att få en insikt hur mar man göra en öppen värld intressant för att spelaren ska kunna ”spela” i denna värld. För denna studie vill jag använda ett spel som har en öppen värld bandesign där spelaren kan åka vart de vill utan något som stoppar dem. Sedan i denna värld skapa en del där spelaren ska hitta utan karta, och ge dem en upplevelse som gör att de vill komma tillbaka. Nyckelord: Öppen värld, Digitala Spel, Bandesign, Upplevelse, Spelutveckling / Ett papper hur man kan använda sig av design principer från nöjesparks design och hur man kan använda dessa i öppen värld bandesign.

Games as a medium is about to change, and with this change comes a search for themes outside the normal range of what is seen as acceptable in the medium. In this paper we, Michael Levall and Carl Boström, use debate and Socratic dialogue to portray the value of looking at a topic from several different angles, with the topic of choice for this project being life philosophies. During production, we create a game which sets out to affect its player even after he or she has finished playing it, possibly teaching the player the value of looking at a problem from different perspectives. Playtests conclude that in order to affect the player, the game should be catered to the player’s skill in interpreting games, and interpretable design can be used to affect how influenced the player is by the game. / Spel som ett medium håller på att förändras, och med dess ändringar kommer sökandet efter nya teman utanför det som idag ses som acceptabelt inom mediet. I detta arbete använder vi, Michael Levall och Carl Boström, debatt och Sokratisk dialog för att porträttera värdet av olika synvinklar, med livsåskådningar som tema. Under produktionen skapar vi ett spel som syftar till att påverka dess spelare även efter det att han eller hon har spelat klart det, med möjligheten att lära spelaren värdet av att se ett problem från olika vinklar. Speltester visar att för att påverka spelaren bör spelet möta spelarens skicklighet att tolka spel, och hur tolkningsbar design kan användas för att påverka hur påverkad spelaren blir av spelet. / Detta är en reflektionsdel till en digital medieproduktion.

The objective of this Master's thesis is to study whether it is possible to create a versatile game engine that can be both application independent and easy to use. In order to study this issue, we have implemented a prototype game engine that supports 2D game development. The system includes predefined programming constructs in order to make game development faster and easier.The conclusion of this thesis work is that the presented problem, while theoretically possible to solve, would introduce too many practical problems during the game development. Furthermore, we conclude that growth in ease of use may limit the functionality of the engine.

This thesis addresses design and development associated problems identified within theplatform-game genre. The problem described originates from the fluctuating curve ofinterest towards the platform-game genre that can be observed between the 1980’s andtoday. The problem stated in this thesis is that modern platform-game developers mayoften overlook and –or deprioritize important design and gameplay related componentsthat we find reoccurring in previously popular games within the genre.This thesis strives to address such problems by decomposing the developmentprocess of a platform game into a light framework titled Implementation categories. Allincluded categories represent a set of design and development related platform-gamecomponents – primarily identified through previous research in the field. In order tocreate an understanding of each category’s complexity - as well as account for thepossibilities to use the categories as a guideline when developing a platform game - aprototype game was developed. The Implementation categories included in theprototype was then measured with a set of software complexity metrics. This thesis willmotivate and explain the selection of implementation categories, account for the usageof software complexity metrics as well as present a detailed documentation of theprototype development.The result of this thesis is a thorough presentation of the Implementation categories -attached with complexity examples for each category as well as a complete gameprototype. The complete results of this thesis will hopefully be of assistance in smallscale,independent or academic game projects in regard of design, decision making,prioritization and time planning.