AnyBoard Emulator - Assessment of Hybrid Board Game Development

Abstract

The project explores hybrid platforms and frameworks related to the AnyBoard platform.

The main motivation for the project was to investigate new possibilities with a goal toexplore new functionality in an interactive game piece and see if there are guidelines thatcan be utilized to ease development.

However, the main outcome was the discussion around this and an early version of avirtual emulator. The work thus presents the AnyPawn Emulator, a virtual game piece tobe used to explore new functionality using a modular smart mobile device.

The main findings and recommendations from this work can be summarized as follows:

1. Few options to explore functionality in interactive game pieces in hybrid boardgames exist today.

In the area of hybrid board games, few platforms or frameworks have had an ex-plicit focus to finding new options/functionality in their game pieces. Having suchfocus may imply a need for the game token to be modular and to include a certaindegree of intelligence . There are platforms with this functionality, however theexploitation is left up to the game designer or not used at all.

2. The board game design process is relevant for AnyBoard.

The process of creating a hybrid board game is comparable to creating a computergame and a board game. This is discussed in depth Chapter 5.

3. An Emulator is developed, however with incomplete communication. More researchis needed to identify the possibilities within the Bluetooth protocol.

The library used to set up the Bluetooth protocol is currently on an experimentallevel and thus not maintained and stable. More knowledge is required to finish thecommunication protocol with the present software.

4. The programing done during the thesis can be found athttps://github.com/simonem/anyboard/tree/Template/games/Templateand is to be con-sidered under the Apache 2.0 license