@article{martens_card_crain_khatri_2024, title={Modeling Game Mechanics With Ceptre}, volume={16}, ISSN={["2475-1510"]}, DOI={10.1109/TG.2023.3292982}, abstractNote={Game description languages have a variety of uses, including formal reasoning about the emergent consequences of a game's mechanics, implementation of artificial intelligence decision-making where the game's rules make up the space of possible actions, automated game and level generation, and game prototyping for the sake of low-time-investment design and tinkering. However, in practice, a new game description language has been invented for almost every new use case, without providing formal underpinnings that follow generalizable principles and can be reasoned about separately from the specific software implementation of the language. Ceptre is a language that attempts to break this pattern, based on an old idea known as multiset rewriting. This paper describes the language formally, through example, and in a tutorial style, then demonstrates its use for writing formal specifications of game mechanics so that they may be interactively explored, queried, and analyzed in a computational framework. Ceptre allows designers to step through executions, interact with the mechanics from the standpoint of a player, run random simulated playthroughs, collect and analyze data from said playthroughs, and formally verify mathematical properties of the mechanics, and it has been used in a number of research projects since its inception, for applications such as procedural narrative generation, formal game modeling, and game AI.}, number={2}, journal={IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON GAMES}, author={Martens, Chris and Card, Alexander and Crain, Henry and Khatri, Asha}, year={2024}, month={Jun}, pages={431–444} }
 @article{card_wang_martens_price_2021, title={Scaffolding Game Design: Towards Tool Support for Planning Open-Ended Projects in an Introductory Game Design Class}, ISSN={["1943-6092"]}, DOI={10.1109/VL/HCC51201.2021.9576209}, abstractNote={One approach to teaching game design to students with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds is through team game projects that span multiple weeks, up to an entire term. However, open-ended, creative projects introduce a gamut of challenges to novice programmers. Our goal is to assist game design students with the planning stage of their projects. This paper describes our data collection process through three course interventions and student interviews, and subsequent analysis in which we learned students had difficulty expressing their creative vision and connecting the game mechanics to the intended player experience. We present these results as a step towards the goal of scaffolding the planning process for student game projects, supporting more creative ideas, clearer communication among team members, and a stronger understanding of human-centered design in software development.}, journal={2021 IEEE SYMPOSIUM ON VISUAL LANGUAGES AND HUMAN-CENTRIC COMPUTING (VL/HCC 2021)}, author={Card, Alexander and Wang, Wengran and Martens, Chris and Price, Thomas}, year={2021} }