Video Game Industry has grown exponentially in the last years. As a consecuence of this evolution, development environments have become more complex toolkits focused on the many features that are common in modern video games. This phenomenon has allowed the emergence of tools that non-technical users can use, making video game development accessible to virtually everyone. Due to the high interest on this type of tools we have decided to develop TRPG Maker, an intuitive and self-contained tool focused on the development of tactical role-playing games for non-technical users without interest on development's technical details. Along with the development of the tool we have carried out a rst experimental validation with real users to determine the degree of usefulness and comfort of the tool, as well as to detect failures and discover possible improvements. Finally, the feedback obtained has been used to create a more complete version of the product, which has been published and made available to the community for free use.
Video Game sector is today one of the most important and valued sectors within
Interactive Entertainment. In recent years it has experienced a great growth,
both in number of users and in business gures. This growth has meant that
new development environments, such as Unity 1 or Unreal Engine2, have become
very sophisticated tools capable of exploiting to the full the capabilities of the
game platforms they are aimed at [
The fact that these engines have become more and more complex over time means that users must have a high degree of specialisation in order to use them.
Given this situation, the engines already mentioned have added visual scripting
systems [
There are also other tools such as GameMaker [
In this paper a new tool called TRPG Maker is presented, as a friendly app for creating video games on the Tactical Role-Playing Game (TRPGs) genre for the end user. For this purpose the article will be divided as follows: the next section summarize the related work in the eld. Section 3 describes our system and how it works. Next, Section 4 explain the evaluation with real users and discuss their impressions and thoughts. Finally, we close the paper with some conclusions and future work. 2
The aim of this article is not to carry out a comprehensive study of this eld, so we will focus on existing tools and frameworks similar to the one we are proposing here, both at the level of commercial applications and at the academic level.
The rst object of study on a commercial level has been RPG Maker [
Other tools reviewed such as GDevelop[
At an academic level we have IsoUnity [
For the development of TRPG Maker we have taken IsoUnity as a reference in terms of software architecture, to implement the following functionalities at a general level: creation of maps, creation of tile-based scenarios, and game event queue management.
The creation of maps and scenarios are essential functionalities of the tool, allowing the user to de ne the world in which the game is set. For the creation of maps we have two basic elements: { Nodes: Locations that we will nd distributed throughout the map. These locations can be battle scenarios, cities or scenarios where players can trade or accept missions, two of the typical actions in this type of video game. Each node will contain a tile-based scenario where we can place blocks, add decorations and determine in which tiles the player's and enemy's units will be located. { Edges: They will connect the nodes so that the player can move around the map through them.
The queues of game events are responsible for the correct execution of the game logic, so that each mission has its own queue and we will also have a general queue responsible for triggering events on the map. The events that can be used in each mission are the following: { Motion event: Move a unit from one position to another on the map . This event also allows determining a sequence of points, so that the unit can go from one place to another making a constant sequence. { Animation event: Starts an animation at a certain point on the map. { Dialogue event: Starts a conversation between the characters on the map. { Modi er event: Changes the status of an inventory item. Such a change may be adding a unit to that object, using it, or deleting it.
Several of the events associated with quests are available on maps, such as dialogs or modi ers. We also have the following: { Encounter event: Spawn a battle on the map. { Lock event: Allows you to lock and unlock edges of the map, so it is possible to disable certain areas of the map.
Our tool has been designed from scratch, implemented in C++ using Unreal Engine 4. To test the usability of the tool and to detect errors, we carried out an experimentation session where only the scenario editor was tested when we were at an early stage of development. To do this, we created a contest in collaboration with Electronic Arts where the objective was to create a level with the tool making use of a character and texture package integrated into the tool.
In this experiment we opted to perform remote usability tests, so that evaluators and users do not need to be in the same place. In this test we focus on measuring the e ectiveness, e ciency and satisfaction when using the tool. To do this, we collected a series of data on the use of the tool, such as the level's editing time, the number of decorations/characters used on the map or the number of actions used by the editor.
This information was supplemented with a tool evaluation questionnaire. This questionnaire consists of 5 questions related to the usability of the tool, with special emphasis on ease of use and ease of learning compared to other similar tools and two more questions about the use of the tool at a commercial level and in the educational eld. In addition we added several free text questions regarding the camera controls, the menu layout, as well as those functionalities that could be added in the future.
10 people participated in the experiment, all of them between 18 and 35 years old. In addition, all the users have advanced computer skills and most of them had already used some visual programming system or video game development tools before. Figure 1 shows the results of the questions related to the use of the tool as a commercial product and in the educational eld. Left pie chart shows the opinions about the commercial use of the tool, where 50% consider that it could be used as a commercial product, 30% disagreeing and 10% strongly disagree about the use of the tool at a commercial level while the remaining 10% neither agree nor disagree.
Right pie chart shows the opinions about the educational use of the tool. Surprisingly 70% of the users totally agree about the use of the tool in the academic eld and 20% considered it appropriate, while only 10% neither agree nor disagree. These results make us think about the possible uses of this tool beyond a commercial product.
In general, the tool had a fairly good acceptance, both among users who had already used other tools such as Construct or Scratch and those who had never tried them. Most users agreed that the controls are adequate and that the application has enough information regarding the use of it. On the other hand, most of the improvement proposals revolved around the resources within it, speci cally increasing the character template, the materials to edit the levels and the presence of interactive objects on the map. After testing the tool at an early stage of development, we realized that there is still a lot of work to be done in order to achieve a solid product capable of competing with existing commercial tools. Even so, the results obtained both at the technical level and at the usability level are quite promising and the impressions of the users have been very positive.
On the other hand, it is interesting to use the tool at an educational level.
Video games are being integrated into the classroom as a means of learning [
Based on the information obtained from user evaluations we will focus on increasing the content of the tool so that the level editing does not become monotonous and on adding new content to it, see new functionalities and objects for the levels or improve certain interfaces to simplify the use of the tool.