Animation of tile-based games automatically derived from simulation specifications

Visual Languages (VLs) are beneficial particularly for domainspecific applications, since they can support ease of understanding by visual metaphors. If such a language has an execution semantics, comprehension of program execution may be supported by direct visualization. This closes the gap between program depiction and execution. To rapidly develop a VL with execution semantics a generator framework is needed which incorporates the complex knowledge of simulating and animating a VL on a high specification level. In this paper we show how a fully playable tile-based game is specified with our generator framework DEViL. We illustrate this on the famous Pacman game. We claim that our simulation and animation approach is suitable for the rapid development process. We show that the simulation of a VL is easily reached even in complex scenarios and that the automatically generated animation is mostly adequate, even for other kinds of VLs like diagrammatic, iconic or graph based ones.