Title: A client for a massively multi-player on-line historical role-playing game
Proposer: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl
Suggested supervisors: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl
Goal:
Design and evaluate user clients for a historical role-playing game.
Description:
Role-playing games, set in an accurate historical context and supported by a scalable, distributed game engine, can provide an engaging learning environment for both players and game developers: players can learn about the historical and societal context of the game, and game developers can exercise modular design of a complex system in order to achieve scalability for a large number of players.
The objective of this project is to develop several clients for an existing server for a historical role-playing game, the JominiEngine [0]. The text client should provide a simple, textual interface to interact with server, using a yet to be defined protocol. The graphical client should provide the same functionality using an easy to use GUI front-end. The mobile client should provide the same functionality as the GUI client, but optimised for mobile devices. The development of the clients should be modular, to maximise the re-use of code between the clients. The usability of these clients should be assessed through user surveys.
The project will proceed in the following phases.
Resources required: Linux platform with C# running on mono and Riak as database back-end
Degree of difficulty: moderate
Background needed: Good general programming skills
References:
[0] JominiEngine
[2] Defining Game Mechanics by Miguel Sicart. In the international journal of computer game research, volume 8 issue 2 December 2008. ISSN:1604-7982.