www.abertay.ac.u k
Investigation, Design and Development of Competitive Multiplayer Games Animesh Sharma, Research Student & Lab Assistant, Division of Design and Informatics, Abertay University (Supervised by Dr. Robin Sloan and Prof. Martin Lynagh) Email: a.sharma1900@abertay.ac.uk Investigation
Design
Development
This research is primarily about studying the competitive multiplayer games, their market, technology and applying it to develop a fully functional multiplayer game within a limited resourced student team to align it with an eSports model.
The design domain of this research is based upon designing a generic multiplayer framework architecture to be used for the development of the multiplayer games.
The development domain is purely about deploying a multi-disciplinary team to develop a fully functional and playable competitive multiplayer game upon the designed multiplayer architecture.
After the spread COVID-19, there has been widespread remote engagement in the video games industry not only within the industry but also in the eSports scene as well. There has been a dynamic shift towards increased popularity of competitive games and therefore more demand and revenue for eSports.
Unreal Engine has been the go-to engine for architecture design of the multiplayer games widely spread in the industry. The versatility of the engine with its documentation and Network Compendium published by Cedric Neunkirchen is being utilized by many developers and also for the design of multiplayer framework for this research.
Since the nature of this project is applied research which involves development and thus a well-developed game artefact is required to validate the end results of the research.
Popular eSports – Valorant, CS:GO, League of Legends, Fall Guys, etc.
Multiplayer Model – Client-Server, Peer to Peer (no longer popular)
Popular Technologies – Unreal Engine, Unity (Photon), etc.
Additionally, further testing of the game artefact is required to report a sense of competitiveness in to align it with eSports.
Abertay University is an operating name of the University of Abertay Dundee, a charity registered in Scotland, No: SC016040.