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- Creators: Computer Science and Engineering Program
Description
Smartphones have become increasingly common over the past few years, and mobile games continue to be the most common type of application (Apple, Inc., 2013). For many people, the social aspect of gaming is very important, and thus most mobile games include support for playing with multiple players. However, there is a lack of common knowledge about which implementation of this functionality is most favorable from a development standpoint. In this study, we evaluate three different types of multiplayer gameplay (pass-and-play, Bluetooth, and GameCenter) via development cost and user interviews. We find that pass-and-play, the most easily-implemented mode, is not favored by players due to its inconvenience. We also find that GameCenter is not as well favored as expected due to latency of GameCenter's servers, and that Bluetooth multiplayer is the most well favored for social play due to its similarity to real-life play. Despite there being a large overhead in developing and testing Bluetooth and GameCenter multiplayer due to Apple's development process, this is irrelevant since professional developers must enroll in this process anyway. Therefore, the most effective multiplayer mode to develop is mostly determined by whether Internet play is desirable: Bluetooth if not, GameCenter if so. Future studies involving more complete development work and more types of multiplayer modes could yield more promising results.
ContributorsBradley, Michael Robert (Author) / Collofello, James (Thesis director) / Wilkerson, Kelly (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Last Hymn was created by the team of Tyler Pinho, Jefferson Le, and Curtis Spence with the desire to create an eccentric Role Playing Game focused on the exploration of a strange, dying world. Battles in the game are based off of rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution using a procedural generation algorithm that makes every encounter unique. This is then complemented with the path system where each enemy has unique rhythm patterns to give them different types of combat opportunities. In Last Hymn, the player arrives on a train at the World's End Train Station where they are greeted by a mysterious figure and guided to the Forest where they witness the end of the world and find themselves back at the train station before they left for the Forest. With only a limited amount of time per cycle of the world, the player must constantly weigh the opportunity cost of each decision, and only with careful thought, conviction, and tenacity will the player find a conclusion from the never ending cycle of rebirth. Blending both Shinto architecture and modern elements, Last Hymn used a "fantasy-chic" aesthetic in order to provide memorable locations and dissonant imagery. As the player explores they will struggle against puzzles and dynamic, rhythm based combat while trying to unravel the mystery of the world's looping time. Last Hymn was designed to develop innovative and dynamic new solutions for combat, exploration, and mapping. From this project all three team members were able to grow their software development and game design skills, achieving goals like improved level design, improved asset pipelines while simultaneously aiming to craft an experience that will be unforgettable for players everywhere.
ContributorsPinho, Tyler (Co-author) / Le, Jefferson (Co-author) / Spence, Curtis (Co-author) / Nelson, Brian (Thesis director) / Walker, Erin (Committee member) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
As universities, nonprofits, community foundations, and governmental organizations proliferate the language of leadership development and social transformation, it is with an inadequate understanding of what agency is being provoked. With an emphasis on ‘career-focused’ tools and techniques in community development literature and pedagogy, there is too little understanding of the knowledge being drawn upon and created by community workers (CWs). Furthermore, this knowledge is often tacit, bodily, spiritual, and collective, making it even more alien to the empiricism-focused world of social science. Situated meaning-making must be recapitulated in the study of community development in order to better address the complexity and ambiguity of specific practices and the associated construction of identities.
This study suggests an alternative way to understand and analyze community development work. Building on fieldwork in the Kumaoni Himalaya of India, it is argued that community workers make sense of the world in large part through the co-construction of dialectic identity metaphors (DIMs). These DIMs help explain to the workers the way the world works, the way it does not work, and what to do about it. More than formal community development theory, I suggest community workers look to dominant DIMs to structure organizational vision and program creation. Furthermore, ideological fragments within local DIMs contribute to the reproduction of dominant ways of knowing and the creation of best practices. For this reason, in situ examination of DIM creation and maintenance is useful for understanding how and why CWs collectively construct their identities and the co-constitutive work.
This study suggests an alternative way to understand and analyze community development work. Building on fieldwork in the Kumaoni Himalaya of India, it is argued that community workers make sense of the world in large part through the co-construction of dialectic identity metaphors (DIMs). These DIMs help explain to the workers the way the world works, the way it does not work, and what to do about it. More than formal community development theory, I suggest community workers look to dominant DIMs to structure organizational vision and program creation. Furthermore, ideological fragments within local DIMs contribute to the reproduction of dominant ways of knowing and the creation of best practices. For this reason, in situ examination of DIM creation and maintenance is useful for understanding how and why CWs collectively construct their identities and the co-constitutive work.
ContributorsPeterson, Charles Bjørn (Author) / Knopf, Richard C. (Thesis advisor) / Callahan, Sharon (Committee member) / Buzinde, Christine (Committee member) / Rodriguez, Ariel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Mobile app development has been the fastest growing software development since the release of the iPhone in 2007 and the creation of the App Store in 2008. After the rise in popularity of the smartphone and mobile app development, businesses started to shift from browser-based software to mobile platforms. There are multiple reasons that any company would want to reach out in the mobile environment, including attracting new customers, creating a better experience, expanding their brand, being more accessible, and overall growth. Developers started to build new platforms that would make it easy for not only their own company but anyone else to develop new applications at a faster pace. Today there are three different ways to create a mobile application: a native app, a hybrid app, and a web app. At DriveTime, we spent time researching and developing possible options for how we could make a mobile application to expand our user involvement. Our conclusion was to use a hybrid application that would incorporate our already existing web app and relaunch it as a native app. I took over this project for DriveTime and planned to implement two new features for their mobile application. Using Apache Cordova, I dived into the Software Development Life Cycle to create and deploy a Rate and Review feature and Push Notification functionality. In the end, I was only able to implement the Rate and Review feature due to some unexpected delays in development. I assumed all roles of a standard Agile development team to understand all of the different aspects that go into planning, creating, and publishing software.
ContributorsAnderson, Jacob Scott (Author) / Balasooriya, Janaka (Thesis director) / Irwin, Don (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05