Serious games: design and development

• Autor(a) principal: Barbosa, André Filipe Santos
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/3751
• topic: Jogos de vídeo - Computador - XNA; Jogos de vídeo - Internet - WebGL; Jogos de vídeo - Aspectos educativos; Jogos de vídeo - Jogos sérios - Educação

With the growth of the video game industry, interest in video game research has increased, leading to the study of Serious Games. Serious Games are generally perceived as games that use the video games’ capabilities to emerge players, for other purposes besides entertainment. These purposes include education and training, among others. By using Serious Games for education, teachers could capture the students’ attention in the same way that video games often do, thus the learning process could be more efficient. Additionally, by exploiting the potential of these virtual worlds, it is possible to experience situations that would otherwise be very difficult to experience in the real world, mainly due to reasons of cost, safety and time. Serious Games research and development is still very scarse. However, nowadays there is a large number of available platforms and tools, which can be used to develop Serious Games and video games in general. For instance, web browsers can now provide easy access to realistic 3D virtual worlds. This grants video game developers the tools to create compelling and rich environments that can be accessed by anyone with an internet connection. Additionnaly, other development platforms can be used to achieve different goals. Desktop technologies provide greater processing power and achieve greater results in terms of visual quality, as well as in terms of creating more accurate simulations. This disseration describes the design and development of two Serious Games, one for PC, developed with XNA, and another for the web, developed with WebGL.