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Swarm General
Nolan Lichti
IDT Masters Thesis Project, 2004
Even as video games become more common form of entertainment for the general public, the number of games geared toward the casual gamer remains fairly low. While strategy games remain popular amongst more serious gamers, the genre still has not been made available to the general public. Most strategy games either require good dexterity to master the controls, or contain fairly mundane activity.
These qualities are not inherent in the design of strategy games. Instead, they follow tried and true conventions that suit more serious gamers. In order to make a game more attractive to the casual gamer, the mechanics must be simplified without denying the player any sense of agency. By allowing the player to define rules for a simulation engine that controls his units, the player can maintain a sense of agency without having direct control over his units. Furthermore, defining these rules can be simplified by using techniques from programming by example research.
Swarm General (ZIP, 497 KB)
Swarm General (TAR, 686 KB)
Design Document (PDF, 397 KB)
Design Document (MS Word, 418 KB)
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Swarm General full game interface.
