Our Research

In each genre of video-game, there are always commonalities that bind different titles to each other. In classifying these similarities, a game can be thought of its base genre-specific features and its further elaborations, to this set of commonalities. Specifying a game in this way allows the developer to focus on these elaborations, while ensuring conformity to preexisting genres and...

We experimentally evaluate display size in arcade style “bullet hell” shooter games. Two scaling methods were compared: uniform, and non-uniform. Results indicate a strongly linear increase of performance with display diagonal size. This was more pronounced with non-uniform scaling.

The method used to display game information, either overlay or in-game, in first-person shooters, likely has a measurable impact on player performance. Quantitative research is needed in this area, as game designers are pushing for heads-up displays to be as minimal as possible. This is especially important for the smaller screens (such as tablets and even cellular devices), which are...

Display technology continues to become increasingly varied, with new combinations of screen sizes and resolutions introduced every year. In order to design or adapt Heads Up Displays (HUDs) to these screens, manual design processes are preferred, since they afford designers modeling flexibility. However, there are aspects of this process that can be automated to reduce the burden on the designers....

Game design principles have been discussed and developed since the late 1990’s and are still created and discussed today. There have been many efforts to collect, identify, and create these principles, yet no effort has been made to test their implementation. This thesis presents an approach to formally analyzing games with game design principles. We gathered 50 game design principles...

We examine the effects of screen size and target movement on selection performance using an experiment based on Fitts’ law. Results indicate that small screen sizes reduced pointing throughput by around 20%. Target movement also negatively impacted performance, but the performance difference between static and moving targets was lower on small screen sizes.