Creating games involves frequent prototyping to quickly obtain feedback. In this paper, we explore the impact of removing a traditional game engine’s separation of scene and game logic that supports scalability to large projects and, instead, combine scene and game logic in a single view. In our tool, Pronto, designers connect game objects with visual representations of behavior to define game logic in the scene view, thus exposing any concern of the prototype to the designer within one click. To explore the implications of the trade-off between scalability and speed of access, we conducted a cognitive walkthrough and an explorative user study comparing prototyping in the Godot game engine and in Pronto. Godot’s separate views made it appear more structured and reliable to users, while Pronto’s scattered game logic accelerated editing and gave users the impression of progressing faster in their implementation.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3714251
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