A video game description language (VGDL) - 0.1

Our motivation is to make it easy to:

• design new games that employ a variety of dynamics and strategies, in a simple language
• automatically generate such games
• use a collection of such games as benchmark for general AI approaches (possibly in competition format).

We decompose game descriptions into two parts:

1. a high-level, human-readable description language, to specify the dynamics, which builds on
2. an ontology of preprogrammed concepts for dynamics, interactions, control.

Programmers extend the possibilities of (1) by writing modules in (2), and game designers can very quickly compose new games from those components without programming.

The first release comes with:

• a parser for the language
• a basic game engine that handles collisions and graphics
• a small ontology of components for simple games
• working examples that are simplified variants of:
  • Sokoban
  • Legends of Zelda
  • Space Invaders
  • Super Mario
  • Lunar Lander
  • Frogger