Software Components for Serious Game Development

The RAGE Game Software Components Repository Supporting Applied Game Development, 2017

This paper presents the architecture of the RAGE repository, a unique and dedicated infrastructure that provides access to a wide variety of advanced technology components for applied game development. The RAGE project, which is the principal Horizon2020 research and innovation project in applied gaming, will develop software components (RAGE software assets) that are reusable across a variety of game engines, game platforms and programming languages. The RAGE repository provides storage space for these assets and associated artefacts and is designed as an asset life-cycle management system for defining, publishing, updating, searching and packaging for distribution of the assets. The repository will be embedded in a social platform for asset developers and other stakeholders. A dedicated Asset Repository Manager provides the main functionality of the repository and its integration with other systems. Additional Tools supporting the Asset Manager are also presented and discussed. When the RAGE repository is fully operational, applied game developers will be able to enhance the quality of their games through the application of selected advanced game software assets. By making available the RAGE repository system and software assets the RAGE project's aim is to stimulate the development and uptake of the Applied Games Industry In Europe.

International Journal of Serious Games

This paper presents the architecture of the RAGE repository, which is a unique and dedicated infrastructure that provides access to a wide variety of advanced technology components for applied game development. The RAGE project, which is the principal Horizon2020 research and innovation project on applied gaming, develops up to three dozens of software components (RAGE software assets) that are reusable across a wide diversity of game engines, game platforms and programming languages. The RAGE repository provides storage space for assets and their artefacts and is designed as an asset life-cycle management system for defining, publishing, updating, searching and packaging for distribution of these assets. It will be embedded in a social platform for asset developers and other users. A dedicated Asset Repository Manager provides the main functionality of the repository and its integration with other systems. Tools supporting the Asset Manager are presented and discussed. When the RAG...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2016

Software assets are key output of the RAGE project and they can be used by applied game developers to enhance the pedagogical and educational value of their games. These software assets cover a broad spectrum of functionalities-from player analytics including emotion detection to intelligent adaptation and social gamification. In order to facilitate integration and interoperability, all of these assets adhere to a common model, which describes their properties through a set of metadata. In this paper the RAGE asset model and asset metadata model is presented, capturing the detail of assets and their potential usage within three distinct dimensions-technological, gaming and pedagogical. The paper highlights key issues and challenges in constructing the RAGE asset and asset metadata model and details the process and design of a flexible metadata editor that facilitates both adaptation and improvement of the asset metadata model.

2018

This paper presents the RAGE marketplace portal (gamecomponents.eu), which is intended as a hot spot and neutral single point of access for serious game technologies. The portal aims at fostering collaborations and the exchange of technical artefacts and associated knowledge and resources between different stakeholders in the field of serious gaming (e.g. educators, developers, researchers, publishers, policy makers and end-users). After a brief introduction to the H2020 RAGE project, the flexible design of the marketplace portal and its underlying software repository are presented. A concise overview is given of the initial set of advanced game technology components created by RAGE, that are currently exposed in the portal. For empirical validation of these components, we have developed 7 serious games based on subsets of these components, which were then tested in educational practice with several hundreds of end-users. This game components portal want to be a neutral hub not depe...

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Game-Based Learning, 2019

This paper investigates the usability of the RAGE component-based software architecture (RCSA). This architecture was designed to support serious game development by enabling cross-platform reuse of game software components. While the architecture has been technically validated elsewhere, this paper studies the perceived usefulness and ease of use of the architecture in practice. An extensive questionnaire based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was administered to 23 software and game developers that have been creating RCSA-compliant game components or integrating these in actual serious games. The results show that developers are generally positive about the usability of the architecture and that the architecture helps them to do a better job in less time. It turns out that developers effectively use all communication modes that are offered by the architecture, most frequently those based on the component´s APIs and the bridge pattern. Some issues were reported, but could be easily addressed. Most developers reported that they have well understood the effectiveness of the architecture and indicated to keep using the architecture in future projects. The outcomes of this study show that the architecture opens up new opportunities to the cross-platform reuse of advanced game functionalities in serious game projects, to reduce production efforts and to advance the domain of serious games at large.