A game engine plug-in for efficient development of investigation mechanics in serious games

Despite their potential, the market for educational serious games (SGs) is still limited, partly because of the high design and production costs. In this paper, we propose a game-engine plug-in for efficient development of a format of investigation in SGs that we designed in order to support discovery-learning in information-rich virtual environments. After describing the framework, the paper presents its application to the development of ‘‘Can’s Crime”, a SG teaching industrial production processes. Data from a preliminary pilot have shown that using the new module allows a significant reduction in development time. Moreover, creation of an abstraction level over the game engine allows improving structured content organization, which is in turn expected to enhance maintainability and modularity. We argue that the same approach could be employed to other game formats, especially in the emerging context of developing games as services.