Early Usability in Model-Driven Game Development

Video games are one of the most influential types of software today. However, they are becoming more and more complex to design and evaluate. In this context, Model-Driven Development approaches seem to be very promising since a video game can be obtained by transforming platform-independent models into platform-specific models that can be in turn transformed into code. In previous work, we defined a usability evaluation method specifically tailored to this type of development process. This paper shows how this method can be used to evaluate the usability of video games in early stages of a model-driven development process. The method relies on a model that decomposes usability into measurable attributes and metrics specific for the video game domain. To show the feasibility of the method, we performed an early usability evaluation of a video game for the XBOX360 platform.