Animation of Tile-Based Games Automatically Derived from Simulation Specifications


Jan Wolter, Bastian Cramer, Uwe Kastens




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 Pac-man 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.