Model-Driven Serious Game Development Integration of the Gamification Modeling Language GaML with Unity

The development of gamification within non-game information systems as well as serious games has recently gained an important role in a variety of business fields due to promising behavioral or psychological improvements. However, industries still struggle with the high efforts of implementing gameful affordances in non-game systems. In order to decrease factors such as project costs, development cycles, and resource consumption as well as to improve the quality of products, the gamification modeling language has been proposed in prior research. However, the language is on a descriptive level only, i.e., Cannot be used to automatically generate executable software artifacts. In this paper and based on this language, we introduce a model-driven architecture for designing as well as generating building blocks for serious games. Furthermore, we give a validation of our approach by going through the different steps of designing an achievement system in the context of an existing serious game.