Context
Game programming is a hard and tedious task of anticipating every possible course of action we want to make available and translating that into specific code associated with objects modeled in the environment, often leading to an endless sequential input processing loop. Petri Nets are a visual language that has proved easy to learn by non-programmers and enables an economic and formal way of specifying behaviors of complex systems of autonomous concurrent actors/processes across diverse domains.
In previous research we have been able to use Petri Nets with advantage in game design specifications. We expect to extend their use as basic language for visual modeling of audio-visual choreographies for running game scenarios and, more generally, to create dynamic models for interactive systems involving humans and software-as-service components.
The main idea is to use collored tokens (defined on demand) to model flow of control as messages among actors, e.g. symbolizing game resource availability and transference, as well as to choreograph execution of audio-visual animations. A runable specification would the reunion of several interactive context diagrams as Petri Nets where actor behaviors are coded as transitions.
The main benefit of such a visual language and tool would be the easy of learning and agile modeling and testing of runnable interactive system definitions, especialy in cases of such complexity as videogames. Plug and play of predefined behaviors by reusing diagram parts and patterns would be another design acceleration mechanism.
Objective
This project follows a Design Research approach, and will aim at the agile prototyping of an easy to use, Petri Net based, visual modeling language and tool, supported on a graphical interface for game specification and runtime interpretation.
To achieve this we will adapt an existing open source Petri Net simulator code and focus on designing a tool to enable drawing and drag&drop of Petri Nets, as behavior models on objects, for experimentation with an existing game engine.
Results:
A demo was developed by Nuno Vicente Barreto as part of his MEI Dissertation. The architecture and user study was published at Videojogos 2013 conference.