Tangible Audio Game Development Kit: Prototyping Audio Games with a Tangible Editor

Audio games are a genre of computer games that waive visual output and solely rely on audio. The majority of audio games (as well as video games) lack publicly available editors that allow the creation of new games or maps within the framework of the respective game. Additionally, no existing game or map editors make use of tangible interaction to facilitate embodied interaction during the creation of games. However, many elements in audio games can be mapped in a profitable way to a tangible editor. We therefore propose the Tangible Audio Game Development Kit that allows fast, iterative and collaborative audio game prototyping by combining physical objects. In this paper, we introduce a first prototype of this concept and present a user study featuring three game design experts. We discuss the results and explain the next steps in advancing the audio game editor based on the feedback.