The game factory : design and implementation of a platform for assembling educational component-based mobile games

Abstract

Mobile software development involves many challenges such as device fragmentation (i.e., enormous hardware and software diversity), need of high technical ability, and a great amount of time to develop. Which makes it very difficult for someone that does not have the technical skills required to do so. There are multiples platforms that aim to reduce the difficulty of creating mobile applications, but they tend to either be limited on what the user can do, or they involve coding to be able to provide more functionalities. What we wanted to do in this project was to make a platform in which the development opportunities are big for the experts and easy for a nontechnical user. A platform that allows a nontechnical user to create a game app only by defining some parameters that can be: information, images, or previously made micro-games, but at the same time is a platform that can grow based on expert work. Our platform is composed of 5 modules: a web platform that makes easy to fill the parameters required, an assembler in charge of creating the apps based on the parameters, a backend service that will store the usage information of the apps, an analytical engine that will generate insights based on the usage information recollected, and a set of micro-games, that are independent game modules created with web technologies (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript). These micro-games can be easily added to the app that is generated to increase the possible interactions in it.