doiSerbia

Animation of tile-based games automatically derived from simulation specifications

Wolter Jan (jwolter@mail.uni-paderborn.de)
Cramer Bastian (University of Paderborn Department of Computer Science Fürstenallee, Paderborn, Germany)
Kastens Uwe (University of Paderborn Department of Computer Science Fürstenallee, Paderborn, Germany)

Visual Languages (VLs) are beneficial particularly for domain specific applications, since they can support ease of understanding by visual metaphors. If such a language has an execution semantics, comprehension of program execution may be supported by direct visualization. This closes the gap between program depiction and execution. To rapidly develop a VL with execution semantics a generator framework is needed which incorporates the complex knowledge of simulating and animating a VL on a high specification level. In this paper we show how a fully playable tile-based game is specified with our generator framework DEViL. We illustrate this on the famous Pacman1 game. We claim that our simulation and animation approach is suitable for the rapid development process. We show that the simulation of a VL is easily reached even in complex scenarios and that the automatically generated animation is mostly adequate, even for other kinds of VLs like diagrammatic, iconic or graph based ones.

Keywords: visual languages, DEViL, simulation, animation, tile-based games, Pac-man