Development Guidelines for Mobile Multiplayer Games

Abstract: In the past decade the advances in mobile technology have produced new powerful genera-tions of mobile devices that come with ever-increasing computing powers and high-speed wireless connection technologies. It is more attractive than ever to develop mobile multiplayer games and many developers are straining to bring more and more multiplayer games into the market. However, there are not many concrete guidelines or helping-tools for developers programming and designing them. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the relevant infrastructures of mobile multiplayer games and with the obtained results produce some development guidelines for the developers. Before the commencement of the investigation, the authors reviewed existing literatures using a structured review process. A search for relevant articles was conducted and the references used in the selected articles were searched in order to find additional relevant references for the investigation. There are many different factors and technical aspects to consider when developing mobile multiplayer games. For example different game genres have different prerequisites and it also governs the degree of complexity of the game design. It is important to also consider the dif-ferent mobile networks and the technical capabilities they encompass so that the developed game does not consume more bandwidth than is supported by the different mobile networks. The biggest hurdle to overcome when developing mobile multiplayer games is the issues re-garding network latency. There exist different approaches for handling this and they are brought up in the thesis. In the end of the thesis, guidelines are presented for facilitating the development of mobile multiplayer games.