Um motor para jogos digitais universais

Abstract

Digital games are being played gradually more for entertainment, leisure and as a tool for education. However, one does not observe an increase in gaming accessibility corresponding to the ascending importance and use of these software systems. Universal Design provides an alternative approach to design more usable and accessible solutions to as many people as possible, regardless of their physical, cognitive and emotional capabilities. The Universal Design for games is in its early stages: so far, only a few universal titles have been created. Those few games were designed following the Unified Design, a process which leads the game design to a more abstract and modality independent way. However, albeit aiding designing the game, the implementation is left to the developer. Game engines are software created to ease the development and the implementation of digital games. Hence, this work describes a game engine for universal games UA-Game Engine (UGE), which purpose is to ease the development of universal games. UGE explores data-driven, event-driven and entity component systems to ease the development of run-time flexible and adaptable games. This dissertation introduces the concepts of Abstract Game World, Concrete Game World, Meta-Game and Game. To achieve this result, this dissertation informally demonstrates that is it possible to construct a universal game by decomposing any game world into three elements: entity (actor), component and event. These elements are used to create an Abstract Game World without a user resulting into an input-output free Meta-Game. Afterwards, it is suggested that it possible to combine the three elements to reconstruct one or more Concrete Game Worlds from the Abstract Game World to suit the interaction needs of the users. With this result, the UGE game engine was developed. UGE uses an extensible and flexible user profile to, during run-time, tailor the Meta-Game into an accessible Game, by defining all the input and output interactions according to the user s interaction needs. Finally, it is described the evaluation and validation process, currently in progress the obtained results so far classify the project as promising.