{"id":684834,"date":"2020-08-20T08:36:45","date_gmt":"2020-08-20T15:36:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=684834"},"modified":"2026-04-17T06:22:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T13:22:08","slug":"tilecode-creation-of-video-games-on-gaming-handhelds","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/tilecode-creation-of-video-games-on-gaming-handhelds\/","title":{"rendered":"TileCode: Creation of Video Games on Gaming Handhelds"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>We present TileCode, a video game creation environment that runs on battery-powered microcontroller-based gaming handhelds. Our work is motivated by the popularity of retro video games, the availability of low-cost gaming handhelds loaded with many such games, and the concomitant lack of a means to create games on the same handhelds. With TileCode, we seek to close the gap between the consumers and creators of video games and to motivate more individuals to participate in the design and creation of their own games.\u00a0\u00a0The TileCode programming model is based on tile maps and provides a visual means for specifying the context around a sprite, how a sprite should move based on that context, and what should happen upon sprite collisions. We demonstrate that a variety of popular video games can be programmed with TileCode using 10-15 visual rules and compare\/contrast with block-based versions of the same games implemented using MakeCode Arcade.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We present TileCode, a video game creation environment that runs on battery-powered microcontroller-based gaming handhelds. Our work is motivated by the popularity of retro video games, the availability of low-cost gaming handhelds loaded with many such games, and the concomitant lack of a means to create games on the same handhelds. With TileCode, we seek [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":684840,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"ACM","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"ACM","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"Copyright 2020 Association for Computing Machinery. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and\/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org.","msr_conference_name":"ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology 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