Cristina: uma ferramenta para transformar protótipos de jogos em código reutilizável

Abstract

Game engines are expensive. One of its biggest hidden costs is in adapting its features to suit a particular game. Therefore, ease of modification is a key requirement in game engine selection. Even so, traditional game development studios prefer to develop most of their technology. In both cases, code reuse is an important factor. Prototyping, as a software process model, is used extensively in the game development industry. Game jams are rapid game development events. They are equivalent to the game prototyping process and, generally, have a source code submission archive on the Web. This means a good supply of non-reusable code. As per the objective of this work, an application that transforms the source codes of a set of game prototypes into a reusable codebase was built by the authors. They researched automated refactoring techniques to use in the application. They also looked for reusability metrics to validate the tool’s effectiveness in producing reusable classes from the original code. The application was successful in transforming the source codes of a set of prototypes submitted to the game jam PyWeek. An experiment confirmed that the extracted codebase was more reusable than the original code. It also validated the proposed refactoring method. This work is important because it shows the recycling of development by-products to reduce costs.

Software engineering

Software prototyping

Software development

Game Engine

Game Jam