In general, videogame development is a difficult and specialist activity. We believe that providing an immediate feedback cycle (liveness) in the software used to develop games may enable greater productivity, creativity and enjoyment for both professional and amateur creators. There are many different methods for achieving interactivity and immediate feedback in software development, including read-eval-print loops, edit-and-continue debuggers and dataflow programming environments. These approaches have each found success in domains they are well-suited to, but games are particularly challenging due to their interactivity and strict performance requirements. We discuss here the applicability of some of these ideas to game development, and then outline a proposal for a live programming model suited to the unique technical challenges of game development. Our approach seeks to provide an extensible way to automate the process of obtaining feedback, through the use of a reactive programming model and dataflow-style UI. We describe our progress in implementing this design, with reference to a simple example game.
URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8848092
Cite this work
@inproceedings{martin2019towards, author= {Martin, Andrew R and Colton, Simon}, title= {{Towards Liveness in Game Development}}, year= {2019}, booktitle= {{IEEE Conference on Games (COG)}}, pages= {1--4}, url= {https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8848092}, abstract= {In general, videogame development is a difficult and specialist activity. We believe that providing an immediate feedback cycle (liveness) in the software used to develop games may enable greater productivity, creativity and enjoyment for both professional and amateur creators. There are many different methods for achieving interactivity and immediate feedback in software development, including read-eval-print loops, edit-and-continue debuggers and dataflow programming environments. These approaches have each found success in domains they are well-suited to, but games are particularly challenging due to their interactivity and strict performance requirements. We discuss here the applicability of some of these ideas to game development, and then outline a proposal for a live programming model suited to the unique technical challenges of game development. Our approach seeks to provide an extensible way to automate the process of obtaining feedback, through the use of a reactive programming model and dataflow-style UI. We describe our progress in implementing this design, with reference to a simple example game.},
}