Frontier

featured project

Frontier is a web-based Flash multiuser application where users have the ability to form communities in a simulated world much like how they would using the “real world” metaphor of colonisation.  Users will also be able to continue using some features of the application via their mobile device allowing them to take a part of the experience with them when they are away from the computer. There are 2 overall aims for the project:

• To produce the multiuser, feature-rich, application with role assignment for each user and colony

• Secondly, to investigate mobile applications with the purpose of being able to produce content demonstrating how the different platforms will affect application design, interaction and integration

Frontier’s engine will be scalable and adaptable ensuring that creating/maintaining content and interactions will be easy and manageable.  The engine will also be capable of being reused and customised for different, future, applications as well as allowing future updates to Frontier.  

There will be an underlying sense of belonging like never before experienced. A user will belong to a colony that has a dynamic physical appearance and static physical location. Their colony will have neighbouring colonies that will remain the same each time that user signs into the application.  To visit a colony the other side of the proposed game world will require orientation skills and a user could pass though many other colonies before reaching their destination.  Encouragement will be given to users to visit other colonies created within the application and rewards are inbuilt to ensure this will happen.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Frontier project is the ability for the user to access certain areas of the game world via their mobile phone.  Real-time multiuser interactions will be demonstrated for the first time in Frontier!.