Mek: Mechanics Prototyping Tool for 2D Tile-Based Turn-Based Deterministic Games
This work provides a tool for game designers to rapidly iterate on mechanics, though it is incremental as it builds on existing prototyping concepts with specific domain restrictions.
The paper introduces Mek, a prototyping tool and language for designing 2D tile-based turn-based deterministic game mechanics, addressing the lack of digital tools for this purpose and demonstrating its capability to succinctly implement various well-known mechanics.
There are few digital tools to help designers create game mechanics. A general language to express game mechanics is necessary for rapid game design iteration. The first iteration of a mechanics-focused language, together with its interfacing tool, are introduced in this paper. The language is restricted to two-dimensional, turn-based, tile-based, deterministic, complete-information games. The tool is compared to the existing alternatives for game mechanics prototyping and shown to be capable of succinctly implementing a range of well-known game mechanics.