Streamlining Serious Game Development: An Extensible System for Unifying Controls in Cross-Platform Serious Game Development

In recent years, serious games have gained traction as an aid to traditional teaching and training methods. While releasing a serious game which can run on multiple platforms is desired, this comes with its own problems, mainly the need to develop multiple projects in parallel. We have identified this as a significant obstacle preventing people from developing cross-platform serious games, and in this paper propose a solution in the form of a system which unifies platform-specific controls. This results in the need to maintain a single code base, with platform-specific code being written only for reading and processing the inputs. The system identifies on which platform the game is currently running and selects the correct code to process inputs. The processed inputs are abstracted, and the rest of the game uses the abstracted inputs, regardless of the current platform.