A Systematic Review of Model-Driven Game Development Studies

Abstract

Model-driven game development (MDGD) leverages the concept of model-driven engineering and game development. The focus of MDGD is to automate the game development process by emphasizing a higher level of abstraction, which will make game development faster and easier. In recent years, researchers in the MDGD community have developed several approaches in this domain. The goal of this article is to survey and classify existing works in MDGD, identify the challenges in this domain, and provide promising future research directions. To achieve this, we conducted a systematic review by selecting 43 articles from a set of 849. The results show that MDE techniques are used to develop games in various genres. 42% of the investigated studies proposed a graphical concrete syntax for game specification and 56% of them used different target environment tools, such as Unity Engine. Moreover, our suggestions include taking advantage of tooling environments and focusing on game components rather than a complete game.