Travis McPhail, An Interactive Editor for Rapidly Prototyping 2D Games

New games tend to revisit a common set of old ideas. Hardware advances improve the appearance of games, but the underlying gameplay remains the same. Unfortunately, creating innovative games is complex and uncertain because testing gameplay concepts cannot be easily decoupled from user-interface, rendering, networking, and physics development.

Game prototyping can be a powerful tool for rapidly testing new game ideas. However, many existing prototyping tools are too cumbersome for commercial applications. We provide a 2D framework which decomposes games into three abstract components game layouts (graphs), game entities (pieces), and game rules and an interactive editor for more easily generating these components. User-interfaces, game rendering, and networking are inferred by our framework. This system has substantially reduced the development times for some example games we have implemented.