Holistic Mobile Game Development with Unity
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
1
Introduction






Multiplayer experiences are becoming more popular on
mobile devices.
The game is rarely played in real-time.
Simple to set up networked communications.
As time between messages becomes faster and more
people join in the same game, the logistics of handling
and synchronizing the data become more complex.
Examine different types of multiplayer game
experiences created on mobile devices.
Explain the underlying infrastructure and
protocols of the Internet that make
it all possible.
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
2
Playing Together on the Same Device

Asynchronous Games
 Turn-based games
○ Trivial Pursuit and Pathogen

Synchronous
 Split-screen
○ Fruit Ninja, Snowball Mania
and Worms 2: Armageddon
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
3
Networking

TCP/IP
 Transmission
Control
Program/Internet
Protocol
 Internal messaging
standard for data
○ datagram and
payload
○ header and IP
address
○ NAT ID and
Punchthrough
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
4
Networking

Clients and
Servers
 Game server
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
5
Networking

Clients and
Servers
 Game server
○ Authoritative
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
6
Networking

Clients and
Servers
 Game server
○ Authoritative
and nonauthoritative
○ Persistent
worlds
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
7
Synchronizing Worlds

Latency or lag
 Dead
reckoning
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
8
Synchronizing Worlds

Latency or lag
 Dead
reckoning
 Entity
extrapolation
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
9
Remote Procedure Calls

Extend functionality
 Networked View Component
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
10
Interacting with the Web
Mediator and message sender
 Dynamic content

 Text and images
 Asset bundles
@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
11
Multiplayer Experiences
Summary
Examined numerous methods for establishing multiplayer
gaming environments on mobile devices.
 Multiple players on one device are easy to implement, but
small the screens can make gameplay difficult.
 Moving to a multiplayer configuration with multiple
devices introduces many new issues requiring a solid
understanding of message sending via the Internet.
 Pulling updated data from the Web is an efficient means
of managing the multiplayer experience.

@ 2015 Taylor & Francis. All rights Reserved.
12