Eberos GML2D: A Graphical Domain-Specific Language for Modeling 2D Video Games

The complexity of game development has increased in the past 30 years, from a task that could almost be entirely handled by a single programmer to an endeavor requiring a large team. To reduce this complexity, we have devel-oped a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) targeting the mod-eling of two-dimensional (2D) games. We call this language Eberos Game Modeling Language 2D (Eberos GML2D1). By raising the level of abstraction through modeling, we al-lowed a simpler specification of the game, and reduced the time and programming efforts. In order to evaluate our ap-proach, we modeled two games and compared the difference between the amount of work required to write the game from scratch and the amount required using our proposed language. These evaluations yielded promising results of 86.4 % savings on programming effort, and 82.3 % savings on programming time