Implementing Babylonian/G by Putting Examples into Game Contexts

Abstract

In game development, there are several ways to debug and inspect systems. These include very specialized and often visual tools, e.g. an on-demand collision box visualization. More general software engineering tools are often also available, e.g. "printf" debugging. However, default tools found in game engines are often either very specialized (like the collision box tool) or more general, but less domain-specific and spatially distant (like "printf" debugging). Thus, we wanted to create a new tool that is as universal and easy to use as "printf" debugging but supports domain-specific representations and has the possibility to be integrated closer to the actual code parts or game elements that are involved. There are pre-existing programming environments similar to our goal: Babylonian Programming systems aim to enable developers to interact with concrete information directly in the code itself. In this paper, we introduce the resulting toolset: Babylonian/G, a Babylonian-inspired plug-in for the Godot game engine. This includes a new way of thinking about Babylonian examples in a game context, in-application probes, and the possibility of adding user input to examples.