Micro-machinations: A DSL for game economies

Abstract

In the multi-billion dollar game industry, time to market limits the time developers have for improving games. Game designers and software engineers usually live on opposite sides of the fence, and both lose time when adjustments best understood by designers are implemented by engineers. Designers lack a common vocabulary for expressing gameplay, which hampers specification, communication and agreement. We aim to speed up the game development process by improving designer productivity and design quality. The language Machinations has introduced a graphical notation for expressing the rules of game economies that is close to a designer's vocabulary. We present the language Micro- Machinations (MM) that details and formalizes the meaning of a significant subset of Machination's language features and adds several new features most notably modularization. Next we describe MM Analysis in Rascal (MM AiR), a framework for analysis and simulation of MM models using the Rascal meta-programming language and the Spin model checker. Our approach shows that it is feasible to rapidly simulate game economies in early development stages and to separate concerns. Today's meta-programming technology is a crucial enabler to achieve this. © 2013 Springer International Publishing.