Building Multiplayer Games for Smartphones: Experience with Connect-4 Game

Social Networking has become very popular on smart phones. Game playing is an important part of social networking. However, most games that run on smart phones are single-player games. Multiplayer games on smart phones are an area that is still in its infancy. Not many games of this type are available on Smartphone platforms. A lot of research and experimentation is needed before the area of mobile multiplayer games can become mature and wide-spread. In this paper we report on our experience developing a multiplayer game that can be played by two players who are not geographically co-located using their smart phones. The system handles connectivity between the two smart phones. Whenever a player makes a move, the opponent player sees it at a near real time speed. The opponent can then make a counter move and so on. The system keeps track of the score and, when the game is over, it announces the winner to the two smart phones. It then prompts them to see whether they want to re-play the game or terminate