A Workflow for Model Driven Game Development

Abstract

Software development faces challenges from high expectation of software qualities, complexity of software and long development cycle. While Domain Specific Modeling (DSM) is helping developers overcome many of these challenges in many domains, it is not generally applied in the computer game domain. DSM can be hard to apply in the computer game domain because of the complexity of computer game domain knowledge and the peculiarity of traditional computer game development process. Without fully understanding these issues and properly solving them, the strength of DSM approaches will be constrained and game developers will be reluctant to use DSM. In this article, we investigate the development process and explore the feasibility of fitting DSM tasks in traditional computer game development in a compact way to lower cost and improve software quality. We introduce the workflow and illustrate the usage of it by presenting a case study. Further, we discuss the benefits and costs of involving DSM solutions in computer game development. Finally, we present the limitations and future work.