The Unlimited Rulebook 2017 - ???

Problem domain

My PhD project studies the many ways in which the discipline of software architecture can improve the development of digital games. I am particularly interested in the challenges of implementing what I refer to as economy mechanics. They are gameplay features that allow the player to manage resources of any kind inside the virtual world of the game.

Coins, items, cards, units, character statistics, skills, magic, time, as well as all the various interactions among them — any resource that plays a part is game.

Research proposal

To reduce the development costs and efforts of implementing economy mechanics, especially in in games with complex resource interactions, my research project proposes a reference architecture called The Unlimited Rulebook. It describes how to determine the software requirements for economy gameplay and how to incorporate that into the game architecture.

As part of this research, we are also involving a couple of actual games developed by USPGameDev so we can evaluate the efficacy of our design. You can learn more about them in the projects section.

Publications

Wilson K. Mizutani. The Unlimited Rulebook: Architecting the Economy Mechanics of Games. Ph.D. Thesis. University of São Paulo, October 2021.

Wilson K. Mizutani, Vinícius K. Daros, and Fabio Kon. Software architecture for Digital Game Mechanics: a Systematic Literature Review (alternate link). Entertainment Computing, Volume 38, 100421. Elsevier, May 2021.

Wilson K. Mizutani and Fabio Kon. Unlimited Rulebook: a Reference Architecture for Economy Mechanics in Digital Games. In Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), pages 58–68. IEEE, 2020.

Wilson K. Mizutani and Fabio Kon. Toward a reference architecture for economy mechanics in digital games. In Proceedings of the Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames 2019), pages 623–626. SBC, 2019.