Our students who did the aMazing game have now been featured over at GameCareerGuide. They tell about their game design considerations and the actual implementation using ZebroGaMQ. Check out the interview!

This year we used the chance to present TidyCity on the Girlsday again. The Girlsday is a popular event in Germany that allows school girls to have a look at professions that are typically persued by men as it is often the case e.g. in the computer science sector. The event shall bolster girls with interest in these topics to further investigate them and might ultimately help with the career choice of the girls.

Today we offered two workshops for playing TidyCity on our campus. In total 17 girls between 13 and 17 participated and played in groups of two or three girls. Below you see some impressions of the day.

Group photo of the first workshop on mobile games.

With so many girls playing the same mission at once you have to be quick to solve more riddles than the others.

These girls experienced that GPS signals are not always perfect...

Teamwork always helps to solve riddles quickly!

On such a beautiful campus playing TidyCity is even more fun!

One big problem for mobile games is often the communication with the server. Although mobile coverage gets better, there are often issues with the data connection which makes traditional calls to the server unreliable. 

This might not be too relevant for slow-paced single-player games like Tidy City, but just imagine an action-packed game for multiple players where players constantly need to exchange information and the overall game state needs to be kept in sync.

aMazing! is such a game. It is a location-based game inspired by old classics like Snake and Tron and two players compete against each other while racing around the city streets trying to claim crowns and trap the opponent. Information needs to be constantly exchanged between the players and the game state needs to be kept in sync between the different devices. It has been created by students Alexander Hermanns and Tianjiao Wang during a lab course at Fraunhofer FIT and the game design was rated as one of the best entries of the "Game Design Challenge: Location, Location, Location" at GameCareerGuide.com.

In order to support such games, we have developed ZebroGamQ, a middleware built on RabbitMQ, which helps game developers to stop worrying about communication issues.

ZebroGamQ is now publicly available on GitHub, and you can also check out the aMazing!-sourcecode there to get an impression on how to use the middleware.

Last weekend we presented Tidy City during the 3. jet-TAGE in Erlangen. This is an annual event for kids and youths organized by the local theatre. On Saturday we offered a workshop on how to create a mission and on Sunday the mission could be played.

Florian (age 12) used the opportunity to come up with several riddles placed in the Old Town of Erlangen. His mission is now publicly available for everyone and is called "Unterwegs in der Altstadt". On the picture you can also see his sister Rebecca (age 8) who took on the task to solveher brother's mission.

Many thanks to all participants who were not afraid of the freezing cold that hit Germany and made walking around outside a tough challenge by itself!

From 4th to 5th November 2011 we presented TidyCity and the TidyCity authoring tool chain at the Next Level Conference 2011. This year's topic was "Art and Culture of digital Games". 500 participants used the chance for creative exchange, visited talks or learned new things in workshops. We performed two workshops, one on each day of the conference. In the workshops the participants were able to discover the fascinating graffiti art in the surrounding area of the conference location ( the AbenteuerHallenKALK in Cologne) with a previously created TidyCity mission. Afterwards they were shown how to create their own TidyCity mission and were astonished how easy it is to contribute your own content.

Left photo: Introduction to TidyCity; Right photo: Playing TidyCity at Next Level Conference

“La fête de la science” (the science fest) is a national manifestation organized by the French Research Ministry. Its purpose is to render science research accessible for everyone. The 20^th edition of the manifestation was held from the 12^th to the 16^th of October 2011 under the theme “Chemistry”.

Following that theme, we have created an augmented reality mobile game based on basic elements (water and carbon dioxide). The game consisted in catching the atoms and compounding them into their corresponding element and was played at the Evry University.  On Friday (13^th) we received 10 high school groups and Saturday was open to all public (family audience).

Students learning about Augmented Reality

Teenagers playing “Elements” game

Recently Melanie Middlemiss and her collegues at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand were host to a group of high school students taking part in the OUASSA camp (http://ouassa.otago.ac.nz). During their stay the students took part in a number of activities to get a feel for what Information Science is all about, and to experience some of the cool technologies that their students are working with. As such, Melanie Middlemiss and her collegues showed them a number of mobile augmented reality and mixed reality games – one of which was TidyCity:

"We set up two challenges for the students – Albany Street Challenge, and Campus Challenge. The first was a simple game that contained 5 riddles that were situated along Albany Street in the Otago University campus. The idea of this challenge was for the students to get the feel for the software and devices that they were using. We thought that they might have had some issues and needed a while to come to grips with the technology, but they raced off in small groups and had the challenge completed in no time!

The second challenge was designed to test the students’ knowledge of the University of Otago campus. These students had only spent a few days on campus earlier in the year, so they were not particularly familiar with the area. This challenge gave them a chance to wander around campus and find some locations that they may not have otherwise visited. The groups had a great time with this challenge and solved nearly all of the riddles – unfortunately we were a little constrained on time by this stage.

The students all reported back that they had a great time using the TidyCity application and completing the challenges that we had set out. They felt that it was a fun and novel way to become familiar with a new location. As far as the Department of Information Science staff are concerned, it was nice and easy to set up the challenges using the TidyCity Scout application on the mobile device, and we hope to use the application again when we have visiting students on campus."

Students puzzling about a TidyCity riddle. (Photo: University of Otago)

Students discussing solution possibilities (Photo: University of Otago)

Student playing TidyCity in Dunedin, New Zealand (Photo: University of Otago)