Educational games offer an effective means to enhance interactive learning experiences. However, developing high quality educational games is difficult. In particular, integrating didactic goals into a game’s design, and verifying the learning outcomes is a complex iterative process. Due to a lack of control over these concerns, fully developed games may lack the intended educational value. We aim to improve educational game development by structuring and partly automating this process. We propose Didactics-Driven Development, a novel framework for keeping didactic goals and concerns in focus throughout the development process. By making didactic concerns explicit, it enables testing interaction patterns against opportunities for learning. We discuss how the approach has been applied to three case studies and how this has informed ongoing development of the framework.

Logic and formal reasoning are essential skills for programming and computer science. Still, they are challenging to teach due to their abstract nature. This paper explores how Game-Based Learning (GBL) can simplify logic concepts, making them interactive and engaging for young learners. We introduce LogiCraft, an educational framework for co-designing board games that teach propositional logic. The framework includes three illustrative tile-based board games: ¬SCR∧BL, Tautoblocks, and Deducto. These games teach propositional logic by merging computational thinking with hands-on gameplay. By integrating syntax and semantics in new ways, ¬SCR∧BL focuses on logic formulas construction and truth tables visualization, Tautoblocks introduces more advanced concepts of negation, tautology, and contradiction, and Deducto highlights translation and model-based reasoning. Playtesting sessions with students and teachers suggest that our games can enhance logic skills and promote cooperative learning. Our initial classroom results show potential for broader applications in game-based learning.

Procedural level generation empowers level designers with tools for generating many levels from a single specification, while engi- neers maintain the level generator. Despite advances in procedural techniques, little is known about their impact on long-term system maintenance. We explore how Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) can help improve procedural level design processes, and support maintenance by integrating level design sketches into generator- agnostic tools. This short paper examines the evolution of Ludo- scope, a state-of-the-art level generator used in the games Unex- plored 1 and 2. In over a decade, it has grown in complexity, with Unexplored 2’s generator now containing over 20K rewrite rules. We investigate how Ludomotion addressed maintenance chal- lenges, and how this impacts procedural level design. Our approach combines: 1) a bottom-up analysis of Ludoscope; and 2) a top-down exploration of a generic DSL for “level blueprints”. This paper con- tributes the first step and discusses ongoing work on a reusable framework for procedural level design. Our work takes a promising first step towards industrial-strength maintenance solutions.

Automated Game Design empowers game designers with languages, techniques and tools that automate iterative design processes.However, these tools currently lack suitable input and feedback mechanisms for creating rules and perceiving how changes affect running game prototypes.As a result, iterating takes too long, forming mental models about cause-and-effect relationships is difficult, and learning how to program can be tedious and frustrating.We investigate how Live Programming can accelerate game design iterations, make visual tools more accessible and engaging, and provide immediate feedback that brings code to life.We propose Live Game Design, a novel approach for rapid game prototyping that introduces mini-cycles to help designers of all skill levels explore, learn, and see a prototype come alive.We introduce Vie (pronounced /vi/), a game-making game for simultaneously prototyping and playtesting simple 2D games using Machinations.In an observational study, we evaluate the app during a Game-Based Learning tutorial for children aged 8 to 14.Our results show Vie is accessible to novices and Live Game Design enables prototyping at the speed of play.

Puzzle tutorials are designed to teach puzzle-solving skills. For game designers, the difficulty is predicting if puzzle challenges will present players with opportunities for learning with trial and error. We aim to empower designers with tools and techniques for making those predictions by analyzing the goal chains inherent to good designs. We study PuzzleScript, an online game engine that has made the source code of high-quality puzzle tutorials available.

Automated Game Design (AGD) empowers game designers with languages and tools that automate game design processes. Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) promise to deliver an expressive means for rapidly prototyping and fine-tuning interaction mechanisms that support rich emergent player experiences. However, despite the growing number of studies that center around languages for games and play, few prototypes are ever thoroughly validated and evaluated in practice. As a result, it is not yet well understood what the costs, benefits and limitations of DSL formalisms are.

Card game creation is a powerful tool for game design. Using playing cards, game designers can rapidly prototype and iteratively playtest a game’s core mechanisms to explore alternatives and improve the gameplay. However, this process is time-consuming, imprecise and challenging to steer and focus. We aim to empower designers with solutions that automate game design processes. In particular, we study to what extent a unified game design language can offer theoretical foundations, systematic techniques and practical solutions.

Live programming brings code to life with immediate and continuous feedback. To enjoy its benefits, programmers need powerful languages and live programming environments for understanding the effects of code modifications on running programs. Unfortunately, the enabling technology that powers these languages, is missing. Change, a crucial enabler for explorative coding, omniscient debugging and version control, is a potential solution. We aim to deliver generic solutions for creating these languages, in particular Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). We present Cascade, a meta-language for expressing DSLs with interface- and feedback-mechanisms that drive live programming. We demonstrate run-time migrations, ripple effects and live desugaring of three existing DSLs. Our results show that an explicit representation of change is instrumental for how these languages are built, and that cause-and-effect relationships are vital for delivering precise feedback.

Procedural Level Generation provides tools and techniques for generating many game levels from a single specification. Instead of creating levels by hand, level designers make use of generators that automate the creation process. However, iteratively improving a level’s design requires encoding generators of adventures, puzzles and encounters in notations that bear little resemblance to generated content. Raising the level quality is difficult, because it is hard to reason about bugs that can manifest inside generated content.

Live programming is a style of development characterized by incremental change and immediate feedback. Instead of long edit-compile cycles, developers modify a running program by changing its source code, receiving immediate feedback as it instantly adapts in response. In this paper, we propose an approach to bridge the gap between running programs and textual domain-specific languages (DSLs). The first step of our approach consists of applying a novel model differencing algorithm, tmdiff , to the textual DSL code. By leveraging ordinary text differencing and origin tracking, tmdiff produces deltas defined in terms of the metamodel of a language. In the second step of our approach, the model deltas are applied at run time to update a running system, without having to restart it. Since the model deltas are derived from the static source code of the program, they are unaware of any run-time state maintained during model execution. We therefore propose a generic, dynamic patch architecture, rmpatch , which can be customized to cater for domain-specific state migration. We illustrate rmpatch in a case study of a live programming environment for a simple DSL implemented in R ascal for simultaneously defining and executing state machines.

Grammar-based procedural level generation raises the productivity of level designers for games such as dungeon crawl and platform games. However, the improved productivity comes at cost of level quality assurance. Authoring, improving and maintaining grammars is difficult because it is hard to predict how each grammar rule impacts the overall level quality, and tool support is lacking. We propose a novel metric called Metric of Added Detail (MAD) that indicates if a rule adds or removes detail with respect to its phase in the transformation pipeline, and Specification Analysis Reporting (SAnR) for expressing level properties and analyzing how qualities evolve in level generation histories. We demonstrate MAD and SAnR using a prototype of a level generator called Ludoscope Lite. Our preliminary results show that problematic rules tend to break SAnR properties and that MAD intuitively raises flags. MAD and SAnR augment existing approaches, and can ultimately help designers make better levels and level generators.