GD&MDSD: The 1st Workshop on Game Development and Model-Driven Software Development
Workshop Organizers: Robert Walter (1), Dr. Maic Masuch (1), and Dr. Ed Merks (2)
(1) Entertainment Computing Group, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany
(2) Macromedia Modeling, Vancouver, Canada
Workshop Description: Games are highly interactive media applications within a hard to define common scope. Developed in multidisciplinary teams, they combine the artistic challenges of multimedia productions with the engineering challenges of IT-productions (Hight and Novak, 2008). Hence, we face ambitious demands regarding the overall development process. However, the growing complexity and scale were not encountered by refined game development methods for many years (Petrillo et al., 2009). Only recently, agile project management methods like Scrum were applied successfully in several productions (Esmurdoc, 2009; Graft, 2009; Nutt, 2009).
In the last decade, MDSD has successfully made the transition from the academic sphere to industrial-grade software development and it provides many advantages (Stahl and Völter, 2006) game development could benefit from. Key features of a system are formally described on a higher level of abstraction (the problem domain), omitting distracting details like the technical realization on a distinct platform (the solution domain). This allows for a better integration of domain experts (e.g. game designers, game writers, concept artists) in the development process. Using model-to-model transformation or model-to-text generation, the transition from problem space to solution space can be automated, which is more efficient and less error-prone than the manual implementation in a third generation language. Moreover, often grounding on a common game engine, games feature characteristics of software product lines, while product-line engineering is an explicit application field of MDSD (Stahl and Völter, 2006). That is why we think that game development and MDSD should get in touch.
Workshop Goals: The workshop's main objective is to bring together researchers and industry professionals of both fields to identify if and how the game development process could benefit from MDSD. Thereby, we want to initialize a dialogue that holds on and evolves far beyond the boundaries of the workshop, creating an information transfer both communities benefit from.
Workshop schedule:
Session: Opening
08:30 - 08:45 Welcome, Maic Masuch
08:45 - 09:45 Keynote Talk: Whether ‘tis Nobler in the Mind to Model, Ed Merks
09:45 - 10:15 Model-Driven Game Development, Robert Walter
10:15 - 10:30 Coffee Break
Session: Position papers
10:30 - 11:00 PULP scription: A DSL for Mobile HTML5 Game Applications, Mathias Funk
11:00 - 11:30 A Feature-based Environment for Digital Games, Victor T. Sarinho
11:30 - 12:00 MDSD for Games with Eclipse Modeling Technologies, Steve A. Robenalt
12:00 - 13:00 Lunch Break
Session: Practical
13:00 - 13:30 How to Create a DSL: A Workflow, Robert Walter
13:30 - 14:00 Identifying DSL Use Cases, Group Finding, Moderated
14:00 - 15:45 Group Work: Designing a DSL with Eclipse Modeling Tools*, Moderated
15:45 - 16:00 Coffee Break
16:00 - 17:00 Presentation & Discussion of created DSLS, Participants
17:00 - 17:30 Closing: Workshop Resume & Open Talk on Resumption
* We will use the latest Indigo + Xtext Distribution: http://xtext.itemis.com/xtext/language=en/36553/downloads
(available for free). You can bring your own laptop to the workshop and work with it.
Further Details/Information:
Workshop Call for Papers: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10307034/CfP%20-%20GD%26MDSD%20Workshop.pdf
Workshop website: http://gd-mdsd.blogspot.com