Join Token-Based Event Handling: A Comprehensive Framework for Game Programming

In action game programming, programmers have to control multiple concurrent activities on the screen corresponding to multiple game characters. To address this difficulty, many game-oriented scripting languages have been proposed so far. However, current scripting languages seem to lack support for interactions among multiple concurrent activities in a state-dependent manner. To overcome this problem, we propose an event handling framework called "join token" in which the states of game characters can be expressed as tokens and interactions can be described as handlers specifying multiple tokens. For the purpose of evaluation, we have developed a game scripting language called "Mogemoge," and wrote several sample games in this language. In this paper, we describe experiences of using join token framework for sample games and compare the code written in Mogemoge against a code written in an existing scripting language.