MAKU: A Code Generator for Bullet Hell Games

Abstract

In each genre of video-game, there are always commonalities that bind different titles to each other. In classifying these similarities, a game can be thought of its base genre-specific features and its further elaborations, to this set of commonalities. Specifying a game in this way allows the developer to focus on these elaborations, while ensuring conformity to preexisting genres and player biases.

This thesis describes MAKU as a fully customizable system for generating HTML5 Canvas browser based games belonging to the Bullet Hell genre of video game. It consists of a domain specific language that encapsulates the core features and this functionality of this genre of video game along with an intelligent code generator, that interprets MAKU language game specifications and generates specialized source code.

MAKU is equally accessible to domain-novices and domain-experts, and allows for the generation of games with variable sophistication. It shows that genres are indeed specifiable and well suited to code-generation.