Engine- Cooperative Game Modeling (ECGM): Bridge Model-Driven Game Development and Game Engine Tool-chains

Today game engines are popular in commercial game development, as they lower the threshold of game production by providing common technologies and convenient content-creation tools. Game engine based development is therefore the mainstream methodology in the game industry. Model-Driven Game Development (MDGD) is an emerging game development methodology, which applies the Model-Driven Software Development (MDSD) method in the game development domain. This simplifies game development by reducing the gap between game design and implementation. MDGD has to take advantage of the existing game engines in order to be useful in commercial game development practice. However, none of the existing MDGD approaches in literature has convincingly demonstrated good integration of its tools with the game engine tool-chain. In this paper, we propose a hybrid approach named ECGM to address the integration challenges of two methodologies with a focus on the technical aspects. The approach makes a run-time engine the base of the domain framework, and uses the game engine tool-chain together with the MDGD tool-chain. ECGM minimizes the change to the existing workflow and technology, thus reducing the cost and risk of adopting MDGD in commercial game development. Our contribution is one important step towards MDGD industrialization.