2011-2012-Artace

Artace!!!

The idea

ARTACE; A Real-Time Android Co-op Experience. ARTACE is a game for the android platform, it can be single played, as well as multiplayer co-op played. Multiplayer gaming works on a short range network connection (LAN). Control your avatar with your phone and play through 15 waves of challenging enemies, alone, or even better, with your friends.

The result

Our game currently features: A game (15 levels, 3 boss levels, animations, possibility to move, collide, shoot, co-op and die. The game experience was based on our usability study results) Short range multiplayer (LAN, by existing network or by smart phone; hotspot) Interactivity (Touch and Orientation sensor input) Hand-drawn graphics FUN, at least we think so ;)

Technical details

Created on the Android platform; written in Java. (Android 2.1) Usage of the Android SDK (Software Development Kit) OpenGL rendering (OpenGL 1.0 ES) UDP socket connection for data transportation. TCP for initialization of connections. Usage of geomagnetic and gravitation sensor to create orientation sensor data.

How to play

Gather some friends and some smart phones, or be a loner, what you prefer. Make sure there is a LAN connection available (router or set up a hotspot) and that everybody is connected to this local network (required!!). Let somebody host the game, his IP address will become visible on his screen. Other players choose client and fill in the IP address of the host in their text field and touch “Connect”. At the host's phone, the host will be noted when somebody has joined and how many players are currently “queued” for the game. Host starts the game by touching: “Start game” Play on!

Control your avatar by tilting and turning the phone, thus resulting in a different orientation of the phone. The orientation then can be read with the orientation sensor which comes standard in almost all modern smart phones. Shooting is done by touching the screen.

Our vision

We have proven that multiplayer games can be real-time played on android phones. We now hope that more games will become available on the market and that they will rise in popularity. The gaming experience of ARTACE is limited, as we only wanted to have a prototype of a multiplayer game.

Phone specifications

For your phone we recommend/require a minimum specification of: A 400 MHz processor, Android 2.1 or higher and a GPU (most important). Without the GPU, the rendering will be a huge load on the CPU, resulting in a laggy game experience.