Design and development of the real-time tournament feature in the MAK07 game platform

In these last years, the world of the smartphones and the one of the videogames have merged, producing a new phenomenon, called Mobile Gaming. The global turnover, related to the mobile games, grew up, becoming one of the most productive activities of the last years, so much that, in the last months, were released smartphones optimized for mobile gaming.In this context, The Mak07 game was developed. It is a puzzle game based on the simple idea of combining together seven numbers, exploiting the arithmetic operations, sum, subtraction, multiplication and division, in order to obtain zero as final result. A group of seven numbers is called schema, and each time a schema is solved, a new one appear on the screen. A player has two minutes to solve the highest number of schemata. The game crossed several development phases, each of them has introduced new features in order to improve the game experience. The first release of the game gave, only, the possibility to solve schemata, one after the other, so the game experience was restricted. Then, in order to enhance the social aspect that each game should have, the possibility to have challenges among players was introduced, developing, also, a ranking classification among the Mak07 users. Now, in order to improve the competitiveness and to increase the game experience, the tournament feature was developed. This final elaborate has the purpose of designing and implementing the tournament feature for the Mak07 game. A tournament has the purpose of gather and managing a limited amount of player that want to compete each other until only one winner remains. Each tournament provides a number of rounds related to the maximum number of participant, and each round has a number of challenges according to the winners of the preceding round. A tournament has an execution time larger than a single challenge. It is composed by a registration phase that last 20 minutes, in which the users can sign up to the tournament, and a variable number of rounds, that last 10 minutes each one. So that, the tournament feature was designed to allow the users to have longer and satisfying game sessions, unlike those offered by the challenges, that last only two minutes.The starting development point is the situation in which the challenge feature was already available, so the tournament feature should be introduced without modifying the available features, but exploiting them. In fact, a big effort was spent not only to write, as much as possible modular and independent code, but also to create a working fusion among the time interval mechanism, related to the tournament, with the state transition mechanism, related to the challenge, focusing on the fact that each challenge has not a limited execution time, but can be played by the two players whenever they wont.The support architecture of Mak07 is composed by a server that contains the business logic and the database, and a mobile client that has a dialogue with the server. To develop the back end software is used the Spring framework, that, thanks to its functionalities, allows to create flexible and modular code respecting all the REST principles needed in a web based system. As databases was used MongoDB, in order to exploit the powerful of a non-relational database, even if some issues should be tackled, as the absence of transactions.In conclusion, it was developed an algorithm simple, in order to make the tournament experience rewarding as much as possible, but, at the same time, capable of managing all the synchronization problems that could arise in a multi-user environment.