Frontier

Contact: Ben Nicholson bnicholson@frontier.co.uk

Realtime 2D Networked Sandbox Game (Working Title) - Matt Johnson, Frontier Developments

We would like to create a simple and social space where friends can get together to enjoy creating something or simply trying out other people's creations. A persistent networked 2D grid-based game where all the content is user created. From the logic to the artwork, all from a few simple pre-defined building blocks like switches, walls, floors, signs, wires, lights and more. The project will require the students to focus on aspects of a number of areas such as networking, live world management and interaction, session control, and bring these together with a little imagination, overcoming real world games development issues. Creativity in design, good cooperation and effective division of labour will be paramount.

Alternative proposal

In sandbox games like Minecraft, the only way to define more interesting game scenarios is to write and install Java mods. It is possible to make automatic behaviours in the Minecraft world, but only using the cumbersome "redstone" logic blocks. The goal of this project is to make a new multi-player sandbox game, based on a 2D grid, where users can define more complex behaviours by clicking on a grid element to embed pieces of code written in a scripting language like Lua. You are welcome to use a commercial or open source rendering engine, but maintaining a shared persistent world will still involve solving problems of persistence, networking, live world management and session control.