Title: Design and implementation of a massively multi-player on-line historical role-playing game

Proposer: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Suggested supervisors: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Goal:

Design a distributed, scalable game engine for a historical role-playing game, and evaluate its usability, performance and modularity.

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 focus on the game design should be on simplicity of the core engine, clear definition of resources and success metric, and encouragement of collaborative game play. The implementation should be scalable to several hundred active players and potentially distributed, so that several machines can cooperate in running the game engine. Clear interfaces between game components need to be defined, to ensure that the game engine is flexible and extensible. For this project, focussing on the core implementation, the user interface can be minimal.

The project will proceed in the following phases.

• Game design and literature survey
• Design of the software architecure supporting the game engine
• Implementation of the core engine and of a minimal user interface for testing
• Evaluation of the system

Resources required: Linux platform

Degree of difficulty: moderate

Background needed: Good general programming skills

References:

• [1] The Hundred Years War

• [2] Defining Game Mechanics by Miguel Sicart. In the international journal of computer game research, volume 8 issue 2 December 2008. ISSN:1604-7982.