A Walkthrough Serious Games Design & Development

The paper details the premises and the challenges associated to designing and developing Serious Games (SG). The authors advance a hybrid, proactive, cost-efficient approach in the SG field that builds upon the power of commercial game engines and that integrates complex, serious games-driven pedagogical analysis. Unlike current developments that are either commercial, implementing the latest technological innovations, or educational, focusing on complex pedagogical constructs, the authors explore an innovative general framework for SG development that will bridge the expertise from the two areas. The researchers adopt a component-based development approach that increases productivity, reduces time to implementation, it is easier to customize and it requires less financial resources. Package software is monolithic, difficult to integrate, and expensive to customize. Custom development is costly and time consuming. Since organisations vary in size, competencies and requirements, component-based development enables companies and educational organisations to reuse what are essentially part of applications that can be customized and tied together to form a unique solution that suits their needs. Cost savings are achieved through a modular approach that enables the reuse of components in customised architectures. The research is carried out within the "Development Environment and Syllabus for Serious Games Implementation" Project, funded by UEFISCDI.