ScriptButler

PuzzleScript is a textual language for puzzle game design created by Stephen Lavelle. The PuzzleScript engine can be found here: https://github.com/increpare/PuzzleScript

ScriptButler is a tool for analyzing PuzzleScript source code. Its objectives are:

1. Empower designers. ScriptButler's analyzers provide feedback about the source code during a game's design, directy in the IDE.
2. Enable empirical studies. ScriptButler also supports bulk analyses, which is needed for empirical studies.

Research Paper

ScriptButler has been used in the following research paper:

• Clement Julia and Riemer van Rozen. 2023. ScriptButler serves an Empirical Study of PuzzleScript: Analyzing the Expressive Power of a Game DSL through Source Code Analysis. In Foundations of Digital Games 2023 (FDG 2023), April 12-14, 2023, Lisbon, Portugal. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3582437.3582467

Running ScriptButler on source code repositories

Here we describe how to reproduce the automated part of this study.

ScriptButler is built using the Rascal meta-programming language and language workbench. More information about setting up Rascal can be found here: https://www.rascal-mpl.org

1. The project must be stored in a directory called AutomatedPuzzleScript.

2. The analyzed PuzzleScript source code repository and the generated report are stored in the following directories.

loc DemoDir = |project://AutomatedPuzzleScript/src/PuzzleScript/Test/demo|;
loc ReportFile = |project://AutomatedPuzzleScript/src/PuzzleScript/report.csv|;

3. Running the analysis requires executing the following commands in Rascal's REPL.

import PuzzleScript::Report;
generateReport(DemoDir, ReportFile);

The result will be in the ReportFile, which stores the data as Comma Separated Values (CSV).

4. The manual part of our analysis can be found in an Excel sheet: paper/report_analysis.xlsx

Running ScriptButler from the IDE

Although most Rascal projects are now built using VS Code, ScriptButler's IDE is still based on Eclipse.

Using the IDE requires the following commands

import PuzzleScript::IDE::IDE;
registerPS();

Note. Games stored in the demo source code repository use the 'txt' as the default extension for PuzzleScript files, but ScriptButler instead requires the 'PS' extension for the IDE to recognize the source code as PuzzleScript.

Thesis

ScriptButler was developed as part of the Master's thesis of Clement Julia.

The original repository can be found here: https://github.com/ClementJ18/ScriptButler

The ScriptButler version provided here has an improved PuzzleScript grammar, and adds a report generator.