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Powwow: A Tool for Collaborative Software Jam Sessions

Authors:
Paul Ioan Muntean
Damir Ismailović
Sebastian Paetzold
Bernd Bruegge

Keywords: Collaborative tool; map based video game; fast prototyping; software jam sessions

Abstract:
The increasing time, complexity and cost of today video game development projects demand for new software tools capable to support the development of fast runnable video game prototypes. This paper presents our conceptual solution for building runnable video game prototypes. For editing video game levels we added editing capabilities in a mobile software tool. We present a mobile software tool which supports editing video game levels. Furthermore, the tool supports testing of previously designed levels with the help of design recognition mechanisms that facilitate loading and simulating of games. The tool supports distributed, collaborative design sessions as it is based on a client server software architecture. Game designers collaborate by sharing their designs on a file server from where the files can be pulled by other users for further editing. This tool is used for software jam sessions in order to support local collaborative game level design. In addition to the tool we present a tool evaluation in this paper. We introduce software jam sessions in order to be able to support local collaborative game level design. In the last part of the paper, we evaluated our tool. The goal is to find out if the working efficiency increases when developing video game levels from scratch with our tool.

Pages: 12 to 17

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2013

Publication date: July 21, 2013

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4227

ISBN: 978-1-61208-287-5

Location: Nice, France

Dates: from July 21, 2013 to July 21, 2013