Learning Game and Simulation Designthrough Multilayer Synchronous Collaboration

A Pre-Prospectus Proposal

Lewis F. Jones III

February 15th, 2011

Abstract

Game & simulation design needs teamwork Tools for collaboration missing in established

game & simulation design programs Design a tool with collaboration principles

within existing virtual reality environment Test subject and objective validity of built-in

collaboration tools

Preliminary Study

What is collaboration with regard to game and simulation development?

Developing the game idea

Communicating

Sharing and managing assets / code

Play-testing

Documentation

How can collaboration be done? How can collaboration be improved?

Applicable Experience

Projects

Educational construction scheduling game within the Second Life VRE

Asynchronous collaboration tool for annotating VRE-based building information model data

Applicable Experience

Classes

Software Process Management Software Engineering Virtual Reality Services

Employment

Social Services software group (SWORD) Naval Research Laboratory

Objective

Address the lack of efficient collaboration tools for game and simulation design

Gather and discuss the necessary aspects for effective developer collaboration

Implement these elements in a “built-in” collaboration tool and test its validity towards further development within established design programs

Methodology

Use the pre-existing OSBEST VRE as the game and simulation design program

Design and implement a collaboration tool directed towards game and simulation developers with little programming experience

Developers should be able to add, edit, move, or delete portions of scripts which are represented as visual tiles

Methodology

Tiles are interconnected and linked by the developer and displayed in a radial flow-chart manner

Take cues from JS toolkit “InfoVis” Developers should be able to view different

layers of connections between content, such as entities, scripts, missions, levels, continents, worlds, and finally entire games

Methodology

Once the design tool is in place, collaboration capabilities will be added

Developers should be able to interact and discuss the concepts behind their games and simulations, including leaving notes for later viewings

Developers should be able to see each other's changes to the designs in real-time from remote locations

Collaborative Design Tool

Expected Results

Experiment involving two groups of student developers that use the collaboration tools

Subjective Results Participants will find the built-in collaboration

tools to be much easier to use and more helpful than third-party collaboration tools

Objective Results Games created using the built-in collaboration

tools will be much more efficient in terms of time spent in development and playability

References Fan, S. B., Johnson, B. R., Liu, Y., Robison, T. S., Schmidt, R. R., and

Tanimoto, S. L. (2010). “Analyzing a Process of Collaborative Game Design Involving Online Tools.” 2010 IEEE Symposium on Visual Language and Human-Centric Computing. pp. 75-78.

Masuch, M. and Rueger, M. (2005). “Challenges in Collaborative Game Design Developing Learning Environments for Creating Games.” Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing.

Mistrik, I., Grundy, J., Van Der Hoek, A., and Whitehead, J. (2010). “Collaborative Software Engineering.” Springer. 1st Ed. Pp 1-470.