Mek: Mechanics Prototyping Tool for 2D Tile-Based Turn-Based Deterministic Games

Abstract: There are few digital tools to help designers create game mechanics. A general language to express game mechanics is necessary for rapid game design iteration. The first iteration of a mechanics-focused language, together with its interfacing tool, are introduced in this paper. The language is restricted to two-dimensional, turn-based, tile-based, deterministic, complete-information games. The tool is compared to the existing alternatives for game mechanics prototyping and shown to be capable of succinctly implementing a range of well-known game mechanics.