This dissertation proposal begins with a discussion about how the education of game programmers was not meeting the needs of the game industry. With this problem identified, this study proceeded to verify the existence of disparities of current game programming curricula. The findings from the literature review were able to: (a) justify the need to develop a career-oriented instructional design model for education of game programming; (b) identify the disparities that caused the mismatch of instructional content between academia and the game industry; (c) review research that contributed to the identification of three disparities: curriculum objectives and structure, instructional content, and curriculum orientation; (d) discuss theories and models of instructional design, student engagement, and related pedagogies; and (e) explore how these theories and models might be instrumental in improving education of game programming. The results obtained from the literature review were also used to formulate guidelines for investigating the status of currently available curricula in game programming. The research design and the research methods utilized by this study to examine the research questions are also described in detail. Four research questions were used to guide the study with the goal of identifying or forming a guiding principle for developing an instructional design model for a career-oriented education of game programming professionals. The results of this study indicated that all of the investigated game programming curricula had not yet produced graduates whom the game companies are interested in hiring as game programmers and that educational institutions had missed an opportunity to equip students with the proper programming skills for the game industry. Furthermore, this study identified that an accreditation standard as well as an industry-accepted instructional design model was not yet available to reflect the personnel hiring requirements of the game industry. The curriculum and coursework must be career-oriented and instructional content must center on game programming. Game programming pedagogy must lead to development of core competencies. In reviewing these findings, the guiding principles for developing an instructional design model became clear. The contribution of this study was to present an immediately applicable instructional design model that could be used as a basis by schools to create or fine tune their game programming curricula. The completed model is provided as an attachment to this dissertation. This proposed instructional design model is intended to provide an initial basis towards a solution to minimize the disparities between academia and the game industry in educational areas of curriculum orientation, curriculum objectives and structure, and instructional content. As with any problem solution, future study and analysis should be done in order to optimize and standardize a game programming curriculum that will be accepted by the game industry as well as accredited by a mutually accepted accreditation body.

In current online games, player positions are synchronized by means of continual broadcasts through the server. This solution is expensive, forcing any server to limit its number of clients. With a hybrid networking architecture, player synchronization can be distributed to the clients, bypassing the server bottleneck and decreasing latency as a result. Synchronization in a decentralized fashion is difficult as each player must communicate with every other player. The communication requirements can be reduced by computing and exploiting frontier sets: For a pair of players in an online game, a player's frontier is the region of the game space where the player may move without seeing (and without communicating to) the other player. A pair of frontiers is called a frontier set. This thesis describes the first fast and space-efficient method of computing frontier sets in large terrains. Frontier sets are computed by growing regions in a connected set of quads in a hierarchical decomposition of the terrain. The solution involves the precomputation of a potentially visible set (PVS) for each quad in the decomposition, which stores all the quads potentially visible from any point within the current quad. Since the memory needed to store the PVSs for all the quads is quite large, a compression technique is introduced which controls the size of each PVS. A PVS merging algorithm, with both lossless and lossy variations, is also described which permits adding the PVS of a point or quad to the PVS of a growing region. The new algorithm is compared to a simple region growing approach where frontiers are grown along the individual terrain points. Using similar merging techniques, the new algorithm performs better, producing larger frontier sets with faster execution times. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2010-05-25 14:53:24.375

The rising cost in video game content creation, both in terms of man hours and in terms of monetary dollars, restricts the ability of video game developers to create unique, entertaining content. Motivated by how this cost is a direct result of "next-generation graphics", I am motivated to ask: what would a next-generation content creation tool look like? I investigate the problem by constructing several such tools. In particular, I construct a mesh quilting algorithm for random level generation, a rapid level construction toolkit based on the concept of an architectural blueprint but supporting features such as complex silhouette geometry and roof geometry, and a tool for rapidly painting world textures. I also introduce a new system for accessing barycentric coordinate data from within the fragment shader, which can be used in support of real-time 3D image quilting, more accurate normal interpolation, and texture rendering from within the world painting tool. Some history of video game content creation is discussed, and a roadmap is charted for future development. / Graduate

Augmented reality opens up a lot of possibilities for new types of games, where the real and the virtual world are mixed. Despite this, augmented reality games are still not very common, probably due to the fact that head-mounted displays (which are often used for augmented reality) are expensive. However, in recent years mobile phones have become more and more powerful, and since many of them have built-in cameras and rather large screens, they are a potential platform for augmented reality games. This thesis explores some of the problems and possibilities associated with the creation of augmented reality games for the Apple iPhone. In order to do that, a multi-player augmented reality game for the iPhone was implemented, and then a number of performance tests and a user study were conducted. The most important conclusion that was reached is that performance is a definite problem when creating augmented reality games for the iPhone. / Augmented reality (förstärkt/utökad verklighet) öppnar upp nya möjligheter för spel där den virtuella världen kombineras med den verkliga. Trots detta så finns det inte många augmented reality-spel tillgängliga, vilket kan bero på att head-mounted displays (som ofta använda till augmented reality) är dyra och inte särskilt lätt att få tag på. Mobiltelefoner är däremot väldigt lättillgängliga och de senaste åren har de blivit mer och mer kraftfulla. Eftersom många av dem dessutom har inbyggda videokameror och relativt stora skärmar, så har mobiltelefoner blivit en potentiell plattform för augmented reality-spel. Denna rapport utforskar några av de problem och möjligheter som är associerade med skapandet av augmented reality-spel för Apples mobiltelefon, iPhone. Ett multi-player augmented reality-spel implementerades för iPhone, och sedan genomfördes ett antal prestanda-tester och en användarstudie. Den viktigaste slutsatsen som drogs var att prestanda är ett stort problem när man skapar augmented reality-spel för iPhone.

In our modern time, age of education is decreasing day by day. People have started tolearn more advanced things at earlier ages. This fact is also true for children. They arelearning more advanced thing now because they are facing new technology in everyaspect of life. Today, one of the most popular subject is computer programming so it is also one ofthe most popular technologies to investigate, inevitably. One reason to such popularity isthat computer programming is very important in every field of life or business and itseems that this importance will improve with time. Certain levels of logic and synthesisare needed for programming. It is crucial to improve these skills. This master thesis tries to improve and tame the programming abilities of childrenand strengthen the knowledge about the basic concepts of mathematics and physics,which are related to the computer science by creating simple computer games usingGreenfoot Framework. In this project, tutorials like approach was used. Designs of the games was studied astutorials and at the end of the last tutorial, two tests and a survey were applied. According to the results, purpose about improving and taming the programmingabilities of children is achieved. For the other purposes, these are increases around 8%and 16%. Since they are not dramatic increases and the target number is 6 I can not sayclearly that these purposes are also achieved.

Datorspelsbranschen är en enorm och ständigt växande bransch med väldigt många utvecklingsområden. För en programmerare kan det därför vara väldigt svårt att komma in och veta vilka delar som man behöver ha kunskap om. Den här rapporten tar upp problemet med att ta ett steg in i branschen för en programmerare genom att gå igenom viktiga delar för spelprogrammering och demonstrerar den med utveckling av ett spel med hjälp av ett ramverk. På så sätt kan man få en förståelse av de olika delarna och problemen som finns i utvecklingen av ett spel. Resultatet blev ett spel skrivet i Java med ramverket libGDX. Spelet går ut på att flera spelare ansluter till en server där man delas upp i lag. Sedan spelar man en match som består av ett antal ronder, för att vinna en rond så måste ett lag eliminera motståndarlaget med ett antal färdigheter som varje spelare kan välja innan matchen börjar. Laget som vinner flest ronder vinner matchen. / The computer game industry is a huge and constantly growing industry with a lot of different development areas. That is why it can be very hard for a pro-grammer to get in to and know what parts you should have knowledge about. This thesis addresses the problem of taking that first step into the industry for a programmer by going through important parts of game programming and dem-onstrating them by developing a game with the help of a framework. In this way you can get a better understanding of the different parts and problems that arise when developing a game. The result was a game written in Java with the framework libGDX. The game involves two or more players that connect to a server where they are split into teams. Then they play a game consisting of a set of rounds, to win a round one team has to eliminate the opposing team by using different abilities that every player can choose before the start of the game. The team with the most rounds won, wins the game.

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is an algorithm which simulates ant foraging behavior. When ants search for food they leave pheromone trails to tell other ants which paths to take to find food. ACO has been adapted to many different problems in computer science: mainly variations on shortest path algorithms for graphs and networks. ACO can be adapted to work as a form of communication between separate agents in a video game AI. By controlling the effectiveness of this communication, the difficulty of the game should be able to be controlled. Experimentation has shown that ACO works effectively as a form of communication between agents and supports that ACO is an effective form of difficulty control. However, further experimentation is needed to definitively show that ACO is effective at controlling difficulty and to show that it will also work in a large scale system.

Gameplay programming is vital for video game development and benefits from good tools and techniques. However, techniques are still used in the industry that involves describing how the computer operates. Reactive programming is a way to describe eventful and stateful computer programs declaratively, focusing on what the program should accomplish. This thesis uses the reactive library UniRx with the game engine Unity 5 to create an FPS with reactive techniques, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of these. Object-oriented reactive programming is used to combine reactive objects with Unity’s component-based framework without using wrappers for non-reactive objects. The results include static methods for observable user input, patterns when defining game components with reactive content, and communication between game objects through interface components. It can be concluded that reactive programming for game programming enables the programmer to describe and understand game logic in a declarative manner. However, combining UniRx and Unity 5 led to complex patterns. Suggestion for future work is using reactive programming with game engines that allows to design game objects that are fully reactive. / Gameplay-programmering är avgörande för utveckling av videospel och har nytta av bra verktyg och tekniker. Dock används tekniker i spelbranschen som kräver att programmeraren beskriver hur datorn utför uppgifter. Reaktiv programmering är ett sätt att beskriva händelserika och föränderliga datorprogram med fokus på vad programmet ska utföra. Denna avhandling använder det reaktiva biblioteket UniRx med spelmotorn Unity 5 för att skapa en FPS med reaktiva tekniker, samt diskuterar fördelarna och nackdelarna med dessa. Objektorienterad reaktiv programmering används för att kombinera reaktiva objekt med Unity’s komponentbaserade ramverk utan att använda wrappers för icke-reaktiva objekt. Resultaten inkluderar statiska metoder för observerbar användarinput, programmeringsmönster för definition av spelkomponenter med reaktivt innehåll och kommunikation mellan spelobjekt via gränssnittskomponenter. Man kan dra slutsatsen att reaktiv programmering för spelprogrammering gör det möjligt för programmeraren att beskriva och förstå spellogik på ett deklarativt sätt. Kombinationen av UniRx och Unity 5 ledde emellertid till komplexa mönster. Förslag till framtida arbete är att använda reaktiv programmering med spelmotorer som gör det möjligt att designa spelobjekt som är helt reaktiva.

In einer Zeit der Digitalisierung nimmt die Relevanz des Programmierens in Entwicklungsumgebungen wie Unity immer mehr zu. Zeitgleich werden Game Based Learning Anwendungen immer häufiger zum Erlernen neuer Inhalte eingesetzt. Solche Anwendungen sind für viele Programmiersprachen zu finden, allerdings gibt es kein einziges, frei zugängliches Produkt, das als Unity-Programmierspiel bezeichnet werden kann, welches anhand einer zusammenhängenden Story und eines klar definierten, roten Fadens Unity-spezifische Lerninhalte vermittelt. Das Ziel dieser Bachelorarbeit ist es, ein Simulationsspiel für das Erlernen der Unity-spezifischen Programmierparadigmen zu entwickeln. Dazu wird die folgende Forschungsfrage gestellt: „Wie kann eine Digital Game Based Learning Anwendung zum Erlernen der Programmierung in der Unity-Engine gestaltet werden, sodass sie benutzerfreundlich, motivierend und erweiterbar ist?“ Um diese zu beantworten, wurden zehn User Experience Tests zur Evaluierung des jeweiligen Entwicklungsstadiums durchgeführt, wobei die Probanden bei ihrem Umgang mit der Anwendung beobachtet und nach ihrer User Experience befragt wurden. Auf Grundlage der gewonnenen Erkenntnisse wurde die Anwendung iterativ verbessert und weiterentwickelt. Das dabei entstandene Ergebnis zeichnet sich in seiner Benutzerfreundlichkeit vor allem durch die Nutzung bereits zielgruppenbasiert bekannter Funktionalitäten, Reiz-Reduzierung, der Vorbeugung von Missverständnissen, ausführliche Feedbacks auf Fehler, genauen Erklärungen der Features und barrierefreie Lösungen aus. Die Motivationsgestaltung der entwickelten Anwendung basiert zum einen auf einer emotionalen Bindung zwischen dem Spieler und der Story/Spielfigur, sowie dem Ehrgeiz, sich ständig zu verbessern und zu überbieten. Entscheidend für die Erweiterbarkeit war es, die Anwendung, welche von Unity-spezifischer Programmierung handelt, auch in der Unity-Engine zu entwickeln. Automatisierungen und die Vereinheitlichung von Spielzielen, sowie die Eindämmung von Fehlerquellen hatten bei der Entwicklung der Anwendung eine hohe Relevanz. Dies zeigt einen möglichen Weg, wie eine solche, in diesem Kontext bisher einzigartige Digital Game Based Learning Anwendung gestaltet sein kann und ist Grundlage für weitere Forschungen, die insbesondere den möglichen Lernerfolg untersuchen sollten.:0. Einleitung 0.0 Motivation 0.1 Zielsetzung, Methodik und Aufbau 1. Grundlagen 1.0 Begriffserklärungen 1.0.0 Spiel (engl. ‚Game‘) 1.0.1 (Digital) Lernen 1.0.2 (Digital) Game Based Learning 1.0.3 Gamification 1.0.4 Serious Game 1.0.5 (Game) Flow 1.0.6 (Game) User Experience 1.1 Unity und C# 1.1.0 Unity 1.1.1 C# 1.2 Neurologische Grundlagen nach Celia Hodent 1.2.0 Wahrnehmung 1.2.1 Erinnerung 1.2.2 Aufmerksamkeit 1.2.3 Motivation 1.2.4 Emotion 2. Programmieren lernen am Beispiel von Unity 2.0 Motivation 2.1 Methoden 2.1.0 Suchmaschinen und Foren 2.1.1 Videos 2.1.2 Bücher 2.1.3 Unterricht 2.1.4 Digitale Spiele 3. Analyse vorhandener GBL-Konzepte 3.0 Pony Island 3.1 SQL Island 3.2 SoloLearn 3.3 Swift Playgrounds 3.4 CodinGame 3.5 Zusammenfassung 4. Zwischenfazit 5. Eigenes Spielkonzept ‚ENC#YPTED‘ 5.0 Zielgruppe 5.1 Lernziele 5.2 Story 5.3 Design 5.4 Features 5.5 Technische Umsetzung 5.6 Genutzte Ressourcen und Programme 6. Umsetzung des eigenen Spiels 6.0 Prototyp V1 – Grundfunktionalitäten 6.1 Prototyp V2 - Erweiterungen 6.2 Prototyp V3 - UX-Tests 6.2.0 UX-Test #1 vom 13.11.2019 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #2) 6.2.1 UX-Test #2 vom 27.11.2019 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #3) 6.2.2 UX-Test #3 vom 06.12.2019 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #4) 6.2.3 UX-Test #4 vom 11.12.2019 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #5) 6.2.4 UX-Test #5 vom 12.12.2019 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #6) 6.2.5 UX-Test #6 vom 25.12.2019 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #7) 6.2.6 UX-Test #7 vom 31.12.2019 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #8) 6.2.7 UX-Test #8 vom 06.01.2020 6.2.8 UX-Test #9 vom 09.01.2020 (Entwicklung bis UX-Test #10) 6.2.9 UX-Test #10 vom 06.02.2020 (Entwicklung bis 10.02.2020) 7. Fazit 7.0 Entwicklungsausblick 7.1 Reflexion 8. Anhang 8.0 UX-Tests 8.1 Unity Foren Beiträge 8.2 Source Code Auszug 8.3 Selbstständigkeitserklärung I. Literaturverzeichnis II. Abbildungsverzeichnis III. Tabellenverzeichnis