Tangible Mobile Game Programming Environment

Abstract

The average human being spends a considerable amount of time waiting. This time is mostly used to passively consume media of all kinds. In this thesis we develop the concept of an application that lets a person create 2D sprite-based games on a mobile device. The goal is to provide a tool for being creative on the fly.

The application should exploit the sensory capabilities of modern mobile devices such as the gyroscope, the accelerometer or the device camera. The device camera is used to create the sprites and the game logic is defined by a visual programming language. Based on this concept, we implement a first prototype using Unity. The first prototype implements a subset of features from the concept, in order to provide a proof of concept. Those features include:

• Creation of multiple games.
• Creation of game objects within the games, by using the device camera.
• Implementing the behaviour to the game objects by defining events and corresponding actions.
• Arranging game objects in a scene in order to build levels.
• Executing the created games.

The prototype was tested in a user study with 26 participants. The user study proved that the participants were able to create simple games within 20 minutes. The user study also showed that the prototype is capable of generating a variety of different game-mechanics. The UI of the prototype turned out to contain some unintuitive behaviours, that should be addressed in future iterations.