Linking Rules and Conceptual Model in a Domain Specific Language

The rationale behind domain specific modeling in software engineering is to raise the level of abstraction while boosting automation in software production. Domain-specific languages (DSLs) typically fall into two categories: high-level, script-like languages and visual modeling languages. The code generation engines that come with them are capable of translating what are written (or visually expressed) to executable code. Our goal is to build a DSL for game development that integrate script-like languages into conceptual models, which is analogous to the way the Object Constraint Language (OCL) puts more semantics in UML models (but ours is essentially at a higher level of abstract than OCL/UML). We identify the following problems for such a DSL: i) conceptual models do not adequately capture the logic of games, ii) keeping conceptual models and rules in synch, iii) defining a rule description language that is powerful enough to decoratively capture most game logic and at the same time facilitates the automation, i.e allows a DSL engine to generate executable code. In this paper, we present our DSL that addresses these three problems. We propose a high-level declarative language for capturing rules. We also report prototypes we have built for our DSL in this paper.