Tutorial Overview

Every language has its own grammatical rules and syntax (vocabulary that it uses). Although each sentence/statement in a program is simple in itself, collectively they can tell a great story. For example, consider a video game, the goal might be to eliminate all the enemies or rescue a target character. The process through which this is achieved can be told as a game plan. When using natural language to describe such a game program, it is important to write the game plan clearly. We call such game plans unambiguous. To help you achieve this more easily, we advise that your game plan contains two parts: Setting and Plot. The Setting describes the What and the Plot describes the How.

Even after dividing the game plan into Setting and Plot, there may still be places in your game that are ambiguous or unclear to the computer. For example, "The rabbit flees." is clear to a human because we infer that the rabbit is running away from some predator, such as a fox. But a computer does not know that, so you must describe from whom the rabbit is fleeing. In this example, the sentence "The rabbit flees from the fox." is unambiguous, as it clearly describes whom the rabbit is fleeing.

More tips on writing a clear game plan:

• Don't use ambiguous wording
  • Words such as "get" should be avoided as an action verb, since it can have many different meanings. For example, instead of "When the fox gets the rabbit, ...", use "When the fox catches (or touches) the rabbit, ..." to make your meaning clear to the computer. Whenever the meaning is unclear, an error message will be given that describes the error as well as provide examples that can correct the error.
• Keep sentences simple.
  • Whenever possible, keep one sentence to just one idea to increase precision and decrease ambiguity. Consider the sentence "The rabbits wander around eating carrots." This sentence is unclear whether the rabbits have to touch carrots in order to eat them. Thus, a better way to describe such a scenario is as follows:
    • The rabbits wander around.
    • When a rabbit sees a carrot, it moves toward the carrot.
    • When a rabbit touches a carrot, it eats the carrot.
    In addition, avoid run-on sentences or sentences that attempt to do too many things at once. When you practice writing in such a manner, it helps you to learn to give instructions clearly, precisely, and unambiguously!
• Focus on just an instant of time
  • The actions in the game will follow the same set of requirements / instructions, even though the positions of the characters might have changed slightly. For more information, read the optional Programming Concepts at the bottom of the page.

• Abstraction: Focus on the relevant and discard irrelevant details in the design process. For example, "the fox chases the rabbit" ignores the low-level details of determining the trajectory and step-wise movements. The user can also describe at the lower-level of details with the position, direction, and other variables of the character if the user chooses.
• Decomposition: Break the problem down to smaller pieces. GameChangineer emphasizes breaking the problem down to actions and interactions between characters. Each interaction is a smaller problem to the large problem of the entire game.
• Pattern Recognition: Many sub-problems may share similarities, and some may be similar to other situations in other games, thereby reducing the effort to compose entirely different ways to realize the result for each sub-problem. For example, how two characters respond to being touched by another character may be similar.
• Algorithm Design: Unambiguously compose the sequence of steps to realize each component, with English. GameChangineer also guides the user with any mistakes made in the process.

Finally, the focus of GameChangineer is on writing clear requirements / instructions for a video game. Thus, much of the low-level details can be skipped. For example, the math behind how to make an object flee another object is automatically synthesized for you behind the scenes. This allows you to focus on the big picture without bothering to compute the trajectories, etc. Because the focus is on the high-level instructions, low-level mathematical manipulations should not be in your sentences; writing sentences that attempt to describe low-level mathematical processes is not the intent of this platform.

The rest of the tutorial will go into the details of writing video games using Game Changineer: what things to avoid and the best practices to follow. We invite you to explore, innovate, and create fun games!

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