research-article

Experiences with design patterns for oldschool action games

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Daniel Cermak-SassenrathAuthors Info & Claims

IE '12: Proceedings of The 8th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Playing the System

Article No.: 14, Pages 1 - 9

https://doi.org/10.1145/2336727.2336741

Published: 21 July 2012 Publication History

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Abstract

This article discusses the application of an Alexandrian pattern language to the design of interactive systems. It grew out of an University course titled A Pattern Approach to Action Game Design, which was offered as an elective in the Creative Technologies program at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand, in 2011. We sketch out the idea of design patterns and describe our experiences with the process of using them for designing oldschool action games, that is, finding patterns, making a language, using it for creating several game designs and realizing one of these designs collaboratively. We discuss the concept of the course and present our pattern language and the game we made. While the language is arguably more like a patchy pattern collection, the various game designs quite loose and the realized game unfinished, the process was challenging and intense, and offered students a new perspective on design. In the spirit of design patterns, we only did what the task at hand required, not artificial exercises. We attempted to connect theory and practice in a natural, direct way as we presented, discussed and used everything we did in order to continue our journey. Our course was not aimed at fixed or frozen products, but on a process that was constantly in flux through collaboration by people who interact and share a common pattern language, use, test, revise and refine it while moving on.

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Dahlskog STogelius J(2014)A multi-level level generator2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games10.1109/CIG.2014.6932909(1-8)Online publication date: Aug-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2014.6932909
Dahlskog STogelius J(2014)Procedural Content Generation Using Patterns as ObjectivesApplications of Evolutionary Computation10.1007/978-3-662-45523-4_27(325-336)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45523-4_27

Index Terms

Experiences with design patterns for oldschool action games
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
    2. Software development process management

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Published In

IE '12: Proceedings of The 8th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment: Playing the System

July 2012

182 pages

ISBN:9781450314107

DOI:10.1145/2336727

Conference Chairs:
Daniel Cermak-Sassenrath
Auckland University of Technology
,
Charles Walker
Auckland University of Technology
,
Program Chair:
Chek Tien Tan
University of Technology, Sydney

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 July 2012

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University of Technology, Sydney

IE '12: The 8th Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment

July 21 - 22, 2012

Auckland, New Zealand

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Dahlskog STogelius J(2014)A multi-level level generator2014 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games10.1109/CIG.2014.6932909(1-8)Online publication date: Aug-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2014.6932909
Dahlskog STogelius J(2014)Procedural Content Generation Using Patterns as ObjectivesApplications of Evolutionary Computation10.1007/978-3-662-45523-4_27(325-336)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2014
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45523-4_27

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Design Patterns for Voice Interaction in Games

Enemy NPC design patterns in shooter games

Exploring aesthetical gameplay design patterns: camaraderie in four games