Game development is a highly technical practice that traditionally requires programming skills. This serves as a barrier to entry for would-be developers or those hoping to use games as part of their creative expression. While there have been prior game development tools focused on accessibility, they generally still require programming, or have major limitations in terms of the kinds of games they can make. In this paper we introduce Mechanic Maker, a tool for creating a wide-range of game mechanics without programming. It instead relies on a backend symbolic learning system to synthesize game mechanics from examples. We conducted a user study to evaluate the benefits of the tool for participants with a variety of programming and game development experience. Our results demonstrated that participants' ability to use the tool was unrelated to programming ability. We conclude that tools like ours could help democratize game development, making the practice accessible regardless of programming skills.

翻译：游戏开发是一项高度技术性的实践，传统上需要编程技能。这为潜在的开发者或希望将游戏作为创意表达手段的人设置了入门障碍。尽管先前已有专注于可访问性的游戏开发工具，但它们通常仍需要编程，或在所能制作的游戏类型上存在重大限制。本文介绍Mechanic Maker，一种无需编程即可创建广泛游戏机制的工具。它依赖于后端符号学习系统，通过示例综合生成游戏机制。我们开展了一项用户研究，以评估该工具对不同编程和游戏开发经验参与者的益处。结果表明，参与者使用该工具的能力与编程能力无关。我们得出结论，类似本工具的系统有助于推动游戏开发的民主化，使该实践不再受编程技能的限制。