Moberly
Online competitive multiplayer mobile game made in Unity
(Jan 2020 - Mar 2020)
Moberly is a competitive arena-based multiplayer mobile game where players compete to obtain the highest score. Players will have to use their skills and the environment to knock others out of the area while aiming to avoid getting knocked off. It is available on Android's Google Play store under a closed Beta. A link to access the Beta is below.
Our Team
Jonathan Jerome
Back-end Programmer
My goals for this project were to understand menus and user interfaces for mobile games, to test Unity’s monetization and advertisement pipelines and to deliver a complete causal mobile game to the Google Play store. I was responsible for creating and maintaining the Unity solution and version control, implementing the Menus and UI for the game, implementing Unity Ads and Analytics, implementing a login / back-end system and deploying our final build to the Google Play Store.
Mitchell Lee
Gameplay Programmer
My goals for this project were to create party style multiplayer game, to make the game operational in network mode and to create a succinct theme throughout the game. I was responsible for the program and design of all the gameplay, creating a scoring system for the game, creating all art assets for the game, creating the theme for the application and porting the game over to the network mode.
Georgette Goh
Network Programmer
My individual goal for this project was to create a network system that allows players to host and join games. I was responsible for developing the network lobby, game-play pre-selection, online game-play synchronization, player death particles, online multiplayer and the linking of scenes.
GAM450 Project Moberly
Mobile Development In Unity
As I had little experience with the Unity game engine and no experience with mobile development, I first began by reading books on the topic. The two books I used were:
Unity 2017 Mobile Game Development by John P. Doran.
Mobile Game Development with Unity by Jonathon Manning and Paris Addison.
For any beginner, I would highly recommend reading these books and following along with the implementations in Unity. These books come with links to all the assets you will need to build a fully featured, albeit simple, mobile game. I also thoroughly enjoyed them, especially the first book mentioned. The author, John Doran, was a former professor at DigiPen and taught in my GAM100 module. His humorous and engaging lectures carry over to his book and it is highly informative while also being careful to maintain a gradual learning curve.
Menus and UI
I was responsible for the design and implementation of the game’s UI. In order to understand what was expected of a mobile game’s menu system, I began my research by playing a few casual games from the Google Play store.
Unity provides a robust set of classes to handle UI. All UI elements require both a “Canvas” and “Event Manager” to be present in the scene. With these classes we can append basic UI elements like “Buttons”, “Text”, “Images” and “Animations” onto the UI layer. In order to maintain resolution independence (mobile phones come in many different resolutions), we can use in-built UI components as well as the “Panel” object to group and structure the layout of our UI elements. Understanding these objects and what they can do is key to creating functional and consistent UI. Thankfully, Unity’s documentation and examples are extensive, and Unity’s developer community is one of the most helpful and active communities I have come across.
Menu and UI
Unity Ads and Analytics
A major way that mobile gaming companies generate revenue is via in-game advertising. This model is synonymous with today’s proliferation of freemium games. In-app purchases are also another common source of revenue for these developers. Unity Ads and In-App purchases are features that come built into Unity Services. As such, we decided that we wanted to integrate them into our game to test such features. Note: the ads we implemented are in test-mode and thus do not actually display ads nor does our game accept payment of any kind.
Firebase SDK
Firebase SDK is Google’s attempt to unify all its cloud services avaliable to Andorid developers. Before Firebase, game developers would have to use different APIs from the Google Cloud Platform to implement the functionality they needed. With the Firebase SDK, Google provides all the same services but now encompassed in a single product and API. Firebase allows for “Authentication”, “Storage and Database management”, “Hosting”, “Analytics” and even “Machine Learning” all in one product and managed in one interface, the Firebase Console.
We wanted to use Firebase to add a Login/User feature to our game. We wanted players, if they chose to, to be able to login inorder to save their statistics and progress.