A Genre-Specific Game Description Language for Game Boy RPGs

Existing game description languages (GDLs) aspire to generality, but their focus on the specification of low-level mechanics leaves game generators that target these GDLs in the awkward position of having to invent combinations of mechanics that work well together from scratch. As a result, many existing game generators are good at producing games that contain novel and surprising combinations of mechanics, but bad at generating games that are readily interpretable by players as cultural artifacts. To address this problem, we introduce the concept of a genre-specific game description language (GSGDL): a game description language that deliberately encodes assumptions about a particular genre of games as a cultural form. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate the use of an internal representation of game structure used by the game creation tool GB Studio as a GSGDL for top-down 2D roleplaying games targeting the Game Boy. The use of this GSGDL gives us leverage to rapidly iterate on game generation features targeting a specific game genre and platform; to work with an existing toolchain that offers graphical editing, code generation, and automated playtesting; and to more readily generate games that are interpretable by players as examples of a particular cultural form.