Dynamic Game Language

One of the major goals of Rice's gaming group is to improve upon the development cycle for computer games. A first step towards this goal was to create a system for prototyping a simple class of games, card games. In order to accomplish this goal, we needed to develop a set of abstractions that could be used to lessen the amount of effort programmers needed to encode different games.

In DGL, we have developed a language for describing card games. From this language, we are able to prototype card games with a compact representation. The game descriptions developed with DGL, contain little to no visualization code. This feature allows programmers to focus solely on the game logic and not on UI or networking engines. The time it takes to develop a game is in the order of minutes to hours as opposed to days or weeks.

Here is the first version of DGL, enjoy.

DGL -- WinRar

DGL -- WinZip

DGL was a first step for the gaming group in improving the game development cycle. The group wishes to create tools that prototype wider classes of games. Our current initiative is the Digital Library Project.