Reducing Development Overheads with a Generic and Model-Centric Architecture for Online Games

Abstract

The development of an online game requires not only the content, visual and auditory design but also a considerable amount of effort for planning, creating and operating the infrastructure for exchanging information between players and backend. Within the context of building an own browser-based massively multiplayer online game, questions like how information of this kind can be exchanged arise. Within this paper, various strategies were planned, developed and evaluated to provide the helpful basis for a platform decision. These strategies do not feel very “game-like”. As a result of this, we created an alternative approach as a runtime environment for games of this kind, which has to simplify the conventional strategies for making games: our GameEngine. This environment combines code generation for clients, automated data transformation, platform independent remote procedure calls and lifecycle management for entities. This paper targets to outline the different strategies for game realisation, and analyses the efforts in comparison to our approach in various applications. Proprietary TCP-based approaches are taken into account, as well as standardised web technologies and currently available runtime environments for game development. All approaches indicated a significant increase in effort for the implementation of various examples. An additional effort that can be nearly avoided, and is achieved with our approach.