Supporting Serious Game Development with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Mapping Solutions to Lifecycle Stages

Abstract

The emergence of effective Generative AI has sparked a revolution in video game development, enabling us to generate game assets and source code at a fraction of the cost and time needed compared to if human developers were involved. But the support available from GenAI goes far beyond the generation of game assets and code, especially in the case of serious games, which have to combine playability with non-entertainment purposes such as, but not only, education. In this paper, the potential forms of GenAI-based support for serious game development are explored and placed into the context of the respective phases of the serious game development lifecycle. As existing lifecycle models are either not specialized for the specifics of serious games or are otherwise too simple, a new serious game development lifecycle model has been proposed for this purpose.