Title: Fire & Move: a Tactical Multi-player Strategy Game

Proposer: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Suggested supervisors: Hans-Wolfgang Loidl

Goal: Complete an implementation the "Fire & Move" and evaluate the digital game through user evaluations

Description:

"Fire & Move" is a tactical strategy game, designed by Prof. Philip Sabin, simulating a British battillon attack in World War II, in particular the tactical aspects of movement and fire on a modern battlefield. A JavaScript implementation, by Mark Flanagan, implements the setup and basic player actions, but still needs to be completed to implement the full game design. The aim of this project is to complete the existing implementation and evaluate both the implementation and the player experience through a live gaming session.

The project will proceed in the following stages:

• Literature review on board game design, and programming mobile devices.
• Completing the current implementation of the game as a networked, multi-player, browser game.
• Test and evaluation of the initial implementation, identifying areas for improvement.
• Refine and tune the above implementation to run on mobile devices.
• Test and evaluation of both implementations, in terms of software quality and gaming experience.

Resources required: No special equipment is needed (uses JavaScript to run in a browser); mobile devices may be needed for the second stage

Degree of difficulty: Moderate

Background needed: Requires good programming background; a general interest in game design is desirable.

References:

[1] Phil Sabin, "Simulating War", Chapter 11 "Tactical Combat", p 202ff