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A game engine designed to simplify 2D video game development

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Abstract

In recent years, the increasing popularity of casual games for mobile and web has promoted the development of new editors to make video games easier to create. The development of these interactive applications is on its way to becoming democratized, so that anyone who is interested, without any advanced knowledge of programming, can create them for devices such as mobile phones or consoles. Nevertheless, most game development environments rely on the traditional way of programming and need advanced technical skills, even despite today’s improvements. This paper presents a new 2D game engine that reduces the complexity of video game development processes. The game specification has been simplified, decreasing the complexity of the engine architecture and introducing a very easy-to-use editing environment for game creation. The engine presented here allows the behaviour of the game objects to be defined using a very small set of conditions and actions, without the need to use complex data structures. Some experiments have been designed in order to validate its ease of use and its capacity in the creation of a wide variety of games. To test it, users with little experience in programming have developed arcade games using the presented environment as a proof of its easiness with respect to other comparable software. Results obtained endorse the concept and the hypothesis of its easiness of use and demonstrate the engine potential.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology (TIN2016- 75866-C3-1-R) and the Universitat Jaume I research project (UJI-B2018-56). Furthermore, this work has been made possible thanks to the graphics resources created by Kenney from Kenney.nl.

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  1. Institute of New Imaging Technologies, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain

    Miguel Chover, Carlos Marín, Cristina Rebollo & Inmaculada Remolar

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  1. Miguel Chover
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  2. Carlos Marín
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  3. Cristina Rebollo
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  4. Inmaculada Remolar
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Correspondence to Carlos Marín.

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Chover, M., Marín, C., Rebollo, C. et al. A game engine designed to simplify 2D video game development. Multimed Tools Appl 79, 12307–12328 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-019-08433-z

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