To celebrate the 800th anniversary of Sint-Niklaas and the day of the youth movement, the people of vzw JOS wanted to create an online mobile game to put the city and its youth movements in the spotlights. Together with four colleagues from Multimedia Technology we were tasked with making a working prototype of this game.

Development process

The summary and rules of the game were given to us by the people of vzw JOS. As the rules were pretty much fleshed out already, we had enough information to immediately start creating various mockups and presenting our suggested plan of action to our employers. Not soon after we started working on the actual game inside of Unity.

During the project I’ve worked on various parts of the application but my main focus was on networking. As the game was a mobile Android/iOS game and walking through an entire city was an essential part of the game, users would be limited to their 4G/3G network connection. This added additional challenges to the project, as it limits the amount of data we can transfer because of data caps and also requires robust network connection handling. People might loose connection, they might stop playing during a session, …

We initially started of using the built-in Unity Networking system (UNet) to handle all of the networking. However during development various networking issues occurred and UNet documentation were sometimes lacking. When we started to require more advanced features such as host migration we decided to make a risky move. Midway the project’s development we ported all the networking code to the Photon framework. As both frameworks do share some similarities we were able to do this in a short timespan. In the end this decision paid off and the application ran more reliably.

Conclusion

The target milestone set at the begining of the assignment was reached, although with a short delay. It was planned to only be a prototype and to be completed by another team of developers, so naturally it could still use some refinement. Therefore we prepared documentation for someone to follow up on the project.

You can find more information about the game on the official website: http://www.stadsspelapp.be.