A Canadian Research Network in 'Creativity Assistive Tools for Games'

CATGames (Creativity Assistive Tools for Games) is a research network supported by the Canadian Heritage - New Media Research Networks Fund. CATGames research teams are creating innovative, leading-edge technology tools for game production that support Canada 's burgeoning interactive games industry by accelerating the creative process, and expanding and enriching content environments and platforms. CATGames is focused on creativity tools that enhance interactive games and entertainment for a wide variety of platforms, including the Internet, consoles, mobile devices, and high definition (HD) home video display. New authoring tools and new processes will better support the creative development of interactive games and digital entertainment. The network is developing tools to increase and diversify Canadian content and storytelling in a variety of game genres and interactive platforms.

The CATGames Network includes six research components:

1) Character Back-Story Generation Application - The goal is to develop an application that would simplify the generation of back-story for characters to model and represent elements of characters, and their social relationships. Back-story is the history behind the characters that occurred previous to, or outside, the main story of the game.

2) Framework for Developing Emergent Behavior in Non-player Characters in game environments - The purpose of this research is to develop an integrated framework for realistic psychosocial behavior in non-player characters, so that they will be more dynamic, reactive, and realistic in order to create a compelling and believable experience for the user.

3) Intelligent Interactive Virtual Characters - This project aims to create authoring tools for characters that interact in real-time with game players using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, combined with knowledge of how faces and bodies move, express and emote. The tools will allow for the creation of emotional interactive character performances that are more dramatically subtle and engaging, while making for a more creative, faster, and cost effective authoring pipeline.

4) Gesture and Tangible Prototyping Tool - This tool will enable designers to quickly conceptualize and create physical, tangible and virtual game prototypes based on physical gestures and manipulation of "smart" objects. The goal of the research is to create a toolkit of simple gestures, tangible objects, and player types.

5) Authoring Tool for a Flexible, Web-based Rapid Prototyping Environment - Using this environment, game developers will be able to flexibly structure the interaction and insert the content from a repository of motion capture and animation clips for human figure animation.

6) Web Browser as a 3D Gaming Platform - The goal of this component is to enable the browser, along with the developers who create Web content, to integrate interactive 3D content within the established 2D framework of the Web without having to download any plug-ins.