Taxonomy of game development approaches

Abstract

While it might seem desirable to “program” games “close to a high-level specification”, the pragmatic reality has not, until very recently, allowed this. In this chapter we discuss the fundamental aspects that define a game and show how these aspects are captured by means of the so-called game development tools. In particular, we show: (i) how the various historical tools have always been intrinsically inspired by the dominant programming languages/paradigms that were the most popular at the time when the tool was developed; and (ii) we discuss these tools by comparing their pro and cons (typically imposed by the chosen language/paradigm or the available hardware) in order to understand the most important requirements for their next generations.