Movement interaction in games has over the last years been a main subject in the area of game design and recent motion based interaction systems provide many improvements over earlier systems. Research has proven that motion based games provide several benefits over general games, they increase the players’ engagement level and may induce both mental and physical health benefits. Still, not much research has been conducted in the area of motion based platform games, even though the platform game genre is one of the most popular game genres. In this thesis, a case study is conducted in order to extract design principles and guidelines applicable for motion based platform games. The study includes implementation of a browser-based 2D platform game that uses the web camera to provide motion based interaction. One of the conclusions in this study indicates that many game features from ordinary platform games only require minor modifications to be applicable for motion based platform games.

<p>This thesis serves as an introduction to anyone that has an interest in artificial intelligence games and has experience in programming or anyone who knows nothing of computer games but wants to learn about it. The first part will present a brief introduction to AI, then it will give an introduction to games and game programming for someone that has little knowledge about games. This part includes game programming terminology, different game genres and a little history of games. Then there is an introduction of a couple of common techniques used in game AI. The main contribution of this dissertation is in the second part where three techniques that never were properly implemented before 3D games took over the market are introduced and it is explained how they would be done if they were to live up to today’s standards and demands. These are: line of sight, image recognition and pathfinding. These three techniques are used in today’s 3D games so if a 2D game were to be released today the demands on the AI would be much higher then they were ten years ago when 2D games stagnated. The last part is an evaluation of the three discussed topics.</p>

The aim of this thesis was to increase understanding of King company success in the social mobile game industry by asking the question: How does a company manage to organize the innovation work in successful casual games within social mobile gaming industry? In order to answer it, we conducted a case study research with secondary data in which we examined the company to discover the elements that contribute to this success, despite a lack of research in how these kind of companies build their business model and strategies, highlighting the players' behaviour. Our findings conclude it is possible to success in social mobile game industry using incremental innovation in different aspects: games design, implementation of the games, and in the business model.  By applying this innovation, with a good viral strategy and giving the player the decision to play by free or purchasing virtual goods, King has been able to become the largest developer game company on Facebook.

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.

This thesis serves as an introduction to anyone that has an interest in artificial intelligence games and has experience in programming or anyone who knows nothing of computer games but wants to learn about it. The first part will present a brief introduction to AI, then it will give an introduction to games and game programming for someone that has little knowledge about games. This part includes game programming terminology, different game genres and a little history of games. Then there is an introduction of a couple of common techniques used in game AI. The main contribution of this dissertation is in the second part where three techniques that never were properly implemented before 3D games took over the market are introduced and it is explained how they would be done if they were to live up to today’s standards and demands. These are: line of sight, image recognition and pathfinding. These three techniques are used in today’s 3D games so if a 2D game were to be released today the demands on the AI would be much higher then they were ten years ago when 2D games stagnated. The last part is an evaluation of the three discussed topics.

Det finns många positiva aspekter med spel i undervisningen, bland annat kan det bidra till ökadmotivation och engagemang. Men det finns också många hinder, det kan krävas mycket tid av läraren föratt sätta sig in i och lära sig hantera ett specifikt spel och det kan vara svårt att anpassa ett spel tillläroplanen, vilket i sin tur kan göra undervisningen långsammare och ineffektiv. Denna studie syftar tillatt undersöka om huruvida läxläsning kan utföras med hjälp av digitala spel på ett effektivt och roligt sätt.Rapporten beskriver ett spel där läraren kan anpassa innehållet efter läroplanen. Spelet innebär atteleverna gör läxorna genom att spela spelet och lärare kan automatiskt ta del av elevernas resultat ochanpassa undervisningen därefter. Resultatet visade att konceptet uppskattades både av de deltagandeeleverna samt läraren. Den inledande prototypen fokuserar enbart på matematik. / There are many positive things about using games in education, for instance it can improve bothmotivation and commitment. But there are also a lot of obstacles, it might require the teacher to spend alot of time to engage with a game and learn a specific game and it might be hard to customize the game’scontent according to the curriculum which could make the tuition slow and ineffective. This study’spurpose is to investigate whether the homework can be performed while playing digital games in aefficient and fun way. The report describes a game where the teacher can customize the content accordingto the curriculum. The idea is to make it possible for students to do their homework while playing thisgame and the teachers will automatically be able to receive the results and customize the tuition accordingto it. The initial prototype will focus on the subject math.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:48:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 PhilipMD_DISSERT.pdf: 3999230 bytes, checksum: fd3b6c186bc10448c63b511e10e6017e (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-02-26 / Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient?fico e Tecnol?gico / The game industry has been experiencing a consistent increase in production costs of games lately. Part of this increase refers to the current trend of having bigger, more interactive and replayable environments. This trend translates to an increase in both team size and development time, which makes game development a even more risky investment and may reduce innovation in the area. As a possible solution to this problem, the scientific community is focusing on the generation of procedural content and, more specifically, on procedurally generated levels. Given the great diversity and complexity of games, most works choose to deal with a specific genre, platform games being one of the most studied. This work aims at proposing a procedural level generation method for platform/adventure games, a fairly more complex genre than most classic platformers which so far has not been the subject of study from other works. The level generation process was divided in two steps, planning and viusal generation, respectively responsible for generating a compact representation of the level and determining its view. The planning stage was divided in game design and level design, and uses a goaloriented process to output a set of rooms. The visual generation step receives a set of rooms and fills its interior with the appropriate parts of previously authored geometry / Recentemente a ind?stria de jogos vem experimentando um aumento consistente nos custos de produ??o de jogos. Parte deste aumento ? referente ? tend?ncia atual de se ter ambientes cada vez maiores, mais interativos e rejog?veis. Esta tend?ncia se reflete num aumento das equipes e do tempo de desenvolvimento, o que torna o desenvolvimento de jogos um investimento de risco e pode reduzir a inova??o na ?rea. Como uma poss?vel solu??o para este problema, a comunidade cient?fica vem apostando na gera??o procedural de conte?do e, mais especificamente, na gera??o procedural de cen?rios. Dada a grande diversidade e complexidade dos jogos, a maioria dos trabalhos opta por trabalhar em g?neros espec?ficos, sendo os jogos de plataforma um dos g?neros mais estudados. Este trabalho prop?e um m?todo de gera??o de cen?rios para jogos de plataforma/ aventura, um g?nero mais complexo que jogos de plataforma cl?ssicos e que at? o momento n?o foi alvo de estudo de outros trabalhos. Dividimos a gera??o de cen?rios em etapas de planejamento e gera??o visual, respons?veis respectivamente por gerar proceduralmente uma representa??o compacta de cen?rio e determinar sua visualiza??o. A etapa de planejamento se divide em game design e level design, e se utiliza de um processo orientado a objetivos para produzir como sa?da um conjunto de salas. A etapa de gera??o visual recebe um conjunto de salas e preenche seus interiores com partes adequadas de geometria previamente constru?das

Context. Procedural content generation (PCG) refers to algorithmical creation of game content (e.g. levels, maps, characters). Since PCG generators are able to produce huge amounts of game content, it becomes impractical for humans to evaluate them manually. Thus it is desirable to automate the process of evaluation. Objectives. This work presents an automatic method for evaluation of procedural level generators for 2D platform games. The method was used for comparative evaluation of four procedural level generators developed within the research community. Methods. The evaluation method relies on simulation of the human player&apos;s behaviour in a 2D platform game environment. It is made up of three components: (1) a 2D platform game Infinite Mario Bros with levels generated by the compared generators, (2) a human-like bot and (3) quantitative models of player experience. The bot plays the levels and collects the data which are input to the models. The generators are evaluated based on the values output by the models. A method based on the simple moving average (SMA) is suggested for testing if the number of performed simulations is sufficient. Results. The bot played all 6000 evaluated levels in less than ten minutes. The method based on the SMA showed that the number of simulations was sufficiently large. Conclusions. It has been shown that the automatic method is much more efficient than the traditional evaluation made by humans while being consistent with human assessments.