Playing the game

A fan of maze games? But fed up with unrealistic experiences on the phone? Want to play with your friends? Not motivated enough to walk outside?

Play aMazing! Walk outside! And build your own maze on the map!

Features:

• Two-player competition mode
• Real world move located by GPS
• Flexible game strategy decided by yourself
• Customizable game settings
• Multiple items to increase fun
• Simple and clear overlay

aMazing is a location-based game for two players. Both players enter the same instance name to create their own session. Then one of them creates an instance and the other one joins. When the instance name is unique and both connect to the server, the game starts after the distance between the players is approximately 15m.

You are located by GPS. You walk and build a blue maze behind you. Under normal conditions, players cannot cross the other’s red maze. If they violate this rule, they need to go back to the red circle to correct it. Otherwise they are not able to do anything else.

Crowns  can be claimed and items can be picked up on the way. The one who claims more crowns in limited time is the winner. A player claims a crown by building a maze as close as possible to the crown within the green circle around the crown. Watch out! Crowns you have got can be stolen by the other player. Items can be picked up by clicking on them when a player is within the green circle around the item. There are 6 types of items:

• Breaker: Click on the map to highlight a part in orange. The breaker will break the selected part of the other’s maze.
• Magnet: Select an item and draw it to your position. Crowns can be selected too, but they will only be drawn towards your position.
• Teleporter: Select an item and teleport it to another random location (decided by the game).
• Free Pass: Reset the warning after crossing the other’s maze. Can only be used if the current position is not too close to the maze itself.
• Rocket: Allows you to run for 150m/s for one minute. Can you be so fast?!
• Binocular: Take a peek at the other player’s inventory for 20 seconds. (Will not update if the player picks up new items)

 

Use them wisely, they will help you a lot. Don’t be greedy, the inventory  can only hold six items at the same time. For fairness, players are encouraged to walk rather than run. There is a maze pool to limit your speed. If the pool is empty, you cannot draw your maze unless you wait for it to recharge. This means you will leave gaps in your maze, which the other player could use to cross it! An exemption is to use a rocket, then your pool will stay full.

What are you waiting for? Pick up your phone, be smart and fit, have fun!

 

BTW: The game design was rated one of the best entries by GameCareerGuide.com [1] in their "Game Design Challenge: Location, Location, Location" [2]. They have also conducted an interview [3] with the students talking about the experience.

Requirements

aMazing is running on smartphones with Android 2.1 and up. Its server side is based on ZebroGaMQ [4], the communication middleware developped for TOTEM games. aMazing source code is available on the ZebroGaMQ repository on GitHub [5] under license GPL v3.0.

 

Play the game

Download aMazing [6]

 

 

If you have any suggestions or questions, please leave a note [7].

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Acknowledgements

 The aMazing game design, aMazing Android application and aMazing game logic server side have been conceived and designed by Alexander Hermans and Tianjiao Wang, during the course "Mixed Reality Games for Mobile Devices" at Fraunhofer FIT.