Teses

Hoje em dia os videojogos atingiram um novo nível de fidelidade gráfica. Além disso, com o aumento da popularidade de novas tecnologias, como a Realidade Virtual e Realidade Aumentada, os jogadores estão mais imersos do que nunca dentro de mundos virtuais com personagens virtuais. A credibilidade dessas personagens virtuais (normalmente chamadas NPCs) exige que estas tenham caracteristicas humanas, como emoções e a capacidade de tomar decisões sozinhas. Uma dessas caracteristicas mais importante é a nossa capacidade de socializar e interagir uns com os outros. Grupos de investigacão académicos criaram inúmeras arquitecturas sociais diferentes que podem transformar as personagens de e mudar os seu impacto no mundo do videojogo. Usando essas arquitecturas as personagens têm desejos sociais, comportamentos complexos e tomam acções para mudar a sociedade a que pertencem. No entanto, a pesquisa académica sobre IA em jogos e a àrea de desenvolvimento de videojogos comerciais encontra-se bastante. Este é o resultado de investigadores quererem criar soluções gerais, enquanto que os programadores de videojogos querem apenas algo que funcione bem o suficiente. O objetivo deste projeto é implementar um modelo de arquitectura social, com origens académicas, num videojogo recente e com sucesso comercial e investigar a sua viabilidade e impacto na experência do jogador. Nesta Tese apresentamos e descrevemos a implementacção do CIF-CK: uma arquitetura social, “Comme il faut” no videojogo “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim”.A implementacão foi distribuida como um Mod, que teve sucesso quase imediato na comunidade de jogadores.

With the mobile games market growing by the day, more and more gamers are shifting to mobile platforms. Most of the games, however, are very simplistic, which leads to non interesting gameplay for veteran players, or are ports of preexisting games, which leads to poor interfaces and user experience. This project focuses on the second problem, trying to understand what the best user interface/user experience is in tactical turn based games for mobile platforms.

Believable interactions between synthetic characters are an important factor defining the success of a game relying on the player being able to create emotional bonds with the game characters. As important as the character being themselves believable is that the interaction with or between such characters is believable. Although research in synthetic characters has developed several models to improve character believability, interactions are generally not the focus of such works. This may be one of the reasons why state of the art models from Academia are still not being used in commercial products. In this thesis, we bridged affective computing and traditional animation principles and create a model for character interaction based on anticipation and emotion that allows for precise affective communication of intention-based behaviors. We also present a study with 52 subjects supporting that our proposal is able to increase scene believability when compared to traditional approaches.

The motivation for this work came from the belief that our civilization is becoming more connected to the ”virtual” world, and that users are using virtual communication tools to be able to communicate, mostly without the need to communicate face to face. This leads to a more closed environment, where people exit their houses only when needed (get groceries, go to work, etc). By viewing positive effects of games on players, and using them in non-game contexts, gamification was created, and is already being used and researched with many approaches, but there is no research regarding its use on outdoor activities, as a motivator for people to exit their homes. For this purpose, we approached this topic and developed GeoChest as a possible solution. GeoChest combines Gamification and GeoCaching, an outdoor activity, in an attempt to understand which gamification techniques and game mechanics can bring a positive feedback from the users that use the application. In the end, we concluded that not only the application was well-designed, but also that most of the application’s game mechanics implemented were well-received by the users, ending this dissertation with the belief that we were able to bring some interesting contributions to Gamification research.