Powwow: A Tool for Collaborative Software Jam Sessions

The increasing time, complexityand costof todayvideo game developmentprojects demandfor new software toolscapable to support the developmentoffast runnable video gameprototypes.Thispaper presents our conceptual solution for buildingrunnablevideogameprototypes.For editing video game levels we addedediting capabilities in amobilesoftware tool. We present a mobile software tool which supports editing video game levels. Furthermore, the tool supports testing of previously designed levels with the help of design recognition mechanisms that facilitate loading and simulating of games. The tool supports distributed, collaborative design sessions as it is based on a client server software architecture.Game designers collaborate by sharing their designs on a file server from where the files can bepulled by other users forfurther editing.This tool is used for software jam sessions in order to support local collaborative game level design. In addition to the tool we present a tool evaluation in this paper. We introduce software jam sessions in order to be able to support local collaborative game level design. Inthe last part of thepaper,we evaluatedour tool. The goal isto find out if the workingefficiencyincreaseswhendevelopingvideo game levelsfrom scratchwith our tool.