Introducing: ZebroGameQ and aMazing!

One big problem for mobile games is often the communication with the server. Although mobile coverage gets better, there are often issues with the data connection which makes traditional calls to the server unreliable. 

This might not be too relevant for slow-paced single-player games like Tidy City, but just imagine an action-packed game for multiple players where players constantly need to exchange information and the overall game state needs to be kept in sync.

aMazing! [1] is such a game. It is a location-based game inspired by old classics like Snake and Tron and two players compete against each other while racing around the city streets trying to claim crowns and trap the opponent. Information needs to be constantly exchanged between the players and the game state needs to be kept in sync between the different devices. It has been created by students Alexander Hermanns and Tianjiao Wang during a lab course at Fraunhofer FIT and the game design was rated as one of the best entries of the "Game Design Challenge: Location, Location, Location" [2] at GameCareerGuide.com [3].

In order to support such games, we have developed ZebroGamQ [4], a middleware built on RabbitMQ, which helps game developers to stop worrying about communication issues.

ZebroGamQ is now publicly available on GitHub [5], and you can also check out the aMazing!-sourcecode there to get an impression on how to use the middleware.