Supporting team work in game design : BETTER - BETter TEam Relationships

Developing a videogame is a costly activity, not only from an economic perspective, but also in terms of time devoted to researching innovative solutions and managing interfaces between creative and technical team members. In this paper, we explore the possibility to use an approach rooted into AI techniques (namely Behaviour Trees) to help establishing a lingua franca between this two different functions, in order to optimize both development time and quality of the final product. In particular, we have developed BETTER, a middleware which can be easily embedded into any game engine, and tested it during the design and development of Crazy-Hill, a commercial video game for iOS-based mobile devices.