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Authoring Games with Tile Rewrite Rule Behavior Trees

Published: 05 July 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Game authoring can be a difficult, technical process; exploring new ways to describe games and game mechanics may help make game authoring more accessible. In this work, we present Tile Rewrite Rule Behavior Trees (TRRBTs): a concept for a domain-specific language for authoring tile-based, turn-based games. The approach combines tile rewrite rules and behavior trees. Using TRRBTs, a game’s state is represented as a grid of tiles, the behavior trees describe the overall flow of the game, and the rewrite rules at leaf nodes describe changes in game state. We include transform nodes, which apply transformations to other nodes in the behavior tree, allowing more complex mechanics to be expressed in a compact way. We demonstrate a text-based approach to using TRRBTs to create several simple games, show how the approach allows re-use of trees to build on existing games, and show how they can provide a unified representation for procedural content generation and enemy AI along with game mechanics.

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    FDG '24: Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games
    May 2024
    644 pages
    ISBN:9798400709555
    DOI:10.1145/3649921
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 05 July 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. behavior trees
    2. game authoring
    3. rewrite rules

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    • Short-paper
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    FDG 2024
    FDG 2024: Foundations of Digital Games
    May 21 - 24, 2024
    MA, Worcester, USA

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