A Distributed Game Engine for Mobile Games on the Android Platform

In the last few years we have witnessed a tremendous change in the way game developers are required to deal with software production. We moved from small groups building the application ground-up to large coordinated teams with hierarchical organisation. To support this transformation, game developers are now using integrated development and execution environments called game engines. Among all possible gaming platforms, mobile ones are proving to be a challenging ground due to their intrinsic requirement for game engines to deploy the final application on a distributed system. In this paper we discuss about requirements for next-generation game engines for mobile devices. In particular, we propose a variation of the standard approach for game engines architecture pushing from a monolithic architecture toward a distributed one. In our solution, the mobile game engine becomes modular and lower the distinction between client and server side

Supporting distributed real-time debugging in online games

In these last few years we are witnessing a tremendous change in the way video games are developed. On the one hand, large development teams with a multi-layered organisation are employed. On the other hand, we see an increasing request for online services and functionalities. Combining these two trends together usually results in large projects involving parallel and distributed systems. Despite the adoption of team-oriented source code and asset repository managers, code testing and debugging is still left to human direct management. In particular, distributed debugging is a complex problem due to the synchronisation required between network nodes to correctly reconstruct the sequence of events leading to a malfunctioning feature. To solve the aforementioned problem, we designed and implemented DREAD: an architecture to support distributed debugging in real-time games. When adopting our architecture, developers will record events on edge systems, collect them on a centralised sync, and then consolidate everything in a synchronous way. Following this approach, it will be easily possible to detect unexpected software behaviours and trace back to their causes