A systematic review of game design methods and tools

Abstract

The game designers craft is very young if compared to filmmaking and software development. The knowledge base and formal techniques of these areas is far more comprehensive. Even after decades of evolution of the games production software, the range of design centered techniques and tools is still limited, as observed by many authors. Thereby, efforts have been made towards the establishment of game design formal methods. This paper presents a sys-tematization over the contributions of researchers and designers towards con-ceptual and concrete tools. These efforts converge to two approaches: the build of a shared design vocabulary and a game design modeling language. While valuable, the existing implementations of these approaches are not mature enough to gain industry adepts, serving only as reference to future works. Moreover, it is needed to discover the designers particular methods, which may contribute to-wards the constitution of a unified design toolbox. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.