Transforming Experience of Computer Science Software
Development Through Developing a Usable Multiplayer
Online Game in One Semester
Ilmi Yoon
1
and Eun-young Elaine Kang
2
1
Computer Science Dept, San Francisco State Univ. 1600 Holloway Ave, SF, U.S.A.
2
Department of Computer Science, California State University, Los Angeles, U.S.A.
Keywords: Multiplayer Online Game, Game Development, Industry Style Team Work, Project-based Learning.
Abstract: We present an instructional design of computer science project-based course to transform students’
experiences of acquiring software development skills. In a collaborative classroom emulating a typical
industry work setting, students will collectively create and build a Multiplayer Online Game using a variety
of complex software components. A course was taught to design and develop a working Multiplayer Online
Game within one semester: building a ready-to-usable game in one semester with whole classmates presents
significant challenges to cope with and stimulate students to realize the important aspects of teamwork and
software engineering principles. Students present their progress, discuss future milestones and trouble
shoots, update documents for clearer communication and utilize source control tool throughout the semester.
Unlike usual class setting, all students worked collaboratively together like one company to achieve the goal.
In the class, students started from concept design and developed specific components of working
Multiplayer Online Game, while broadly learning game design, 3D graphics, Game Engine, Server-client
architecture, Game Protocol, network programming, database, Software Engineering principles, and large
application development as a team project. The course was successfully transferred to CSULA in Fall
Quarter, 2013.
1 INTRODUCTION
Over the past decade, the software development
process has become exceedingly complex (Fuggetta,
2000). The industry now expects software engineers
and computer scientists to excel not only in the
technical aspects of software development, but also
in self-learning of advances in new technology, the
fluent communication of their ideas in presentations
and documentation, often produced in a
collaborative environment (Dutoit and Bruegge,
1998). Because software development today cannot
be accomplished without collaboration across teams,
experience in this area is highly desirable in
computer science students entering the job market
(Mencher, 2003; Parberry et al., 2005). Given the
rapidly changing nature of technology, software
developers can no longer rely exclusively on
concrete knowledge previously attained. Rather, they
must have the ability and adaptability to adjust
swiftly to changing practices and emerging
platforms. These abilities are seldom addressed in an
academic setting, leaving new graduates minimally
prepared and struggling in these important areas.
There is an enormous need for courses that provide
students with the training and experience to meet the
changing expectations of industry and to
successfully transform knowledge they have
acquired in the classroom into the ability to produce
complex, innovative, high-quality software products
in a collaborative environment.
The pedagogy currently used in most Computer
Science classes with team projects employs team
projects of a few weeks to a whole semester in
duration with several team members, involving
minimal or no collaboration across teams. While
such an approach is essential and effective for
teaching specific content knowledge and achieving
particular learning outcomes, it is also limited in that
it focuses on the development of relatively simple
programs to teach specific content knowledge and on
the completion of classroom-specific assignments
329
Yoon I. and Kang E..
Transforming Experience of Computer Science Software Development Through Developing a Usable Multiplayer Online Game in One Semester.
DOI: 10.5220/0004963703290335
In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2014), pages 329-335
ISBN: 978-989-758-021-5
Copyright
c
2014 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
that are not readily transferrable to an industry
setting and do not adequately prepare students to
work on large-scale programming projects in a
highly synchronized work environment that demands
complex contributions across teams. Students are
rarely exposed to inter-team interactions or to
working collaboratively across teams to develop a
common product. Ultimately, the scope of the
software developed in the typical CS classroom and
the integration of its components tend to be
simplistic as a result of the aforementioned
limitations (Parberry et al., 2005). This paper
presents an alternative approach to prepare students
for the challenges they will face in industry: a course
designed around a complex project to be completed
by the class as a whole, giving students practical
experience with inter-team collaboration and an
understanding of the complexities of the software
development process.
Objectives of the course are to: (1) teach students
effective communication, presentation and
collaboration skills that are often neglected in the
traditional classroom; (2) motivate students to learn
essential CS core content through peer interaction
and encouragement; (3) enable students to produce a
robust end product; and (4) give students practical
insights into the real-world work environment to
prepare them to master the challenges of a career in
CS.
In next section, we discuss backgrounds on
selecting Multiplayer game as instructional material.
In section 3, we discuss the course design and
structure to teach students to build a working
MMORPG game within a semester (15 weeks). In
section 4, we present the results and learning
outcome. Conclusion and on-going work are
discussed at section 5.
2 BACKGROUND -
INSTRUCTIONAL MATERIAL
Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game
(MMORPG) is a type of online multiplayer game
that allows thousands of players to play concurrently
in a virtual world. Even after players log out or
disconnect, the virtual world persists and the updates
made by player remain. Such games form an online
community of players who interact with one another
and progress through the game over time. The
quality of social interactions and character
progression within the game radically increase the
excitement of the game; popular games like WoW
(World of Warcraft) and Second Life easily develop
communities of multimillions of players, to the point
that they have become significant trends in global
youth culture (Song, S., Lee, J., 2007). It is the
author’s experience that being able to understand the
behind-the-scenes work that goes into the creation of
such games and then developing a game themselves
strongly motivates students to focus on and excel in
their CS coursework.
Social gaming and MMORPG are relatively
recent game genres as they bloom over the
availability of Internet. Unlike stand-alone game, a
MMORPG game keeps virtual world persistent even
after players log out, so game server has to run
infinitely connecting all the clients and updating
game status at database. Therefore, building a
MMORPG game covers broad spectrum of computer
science technology from computer graphics, 3D
modeling, game engine, network programming,
client-server architecture, and database, so it helps
students exposed to diverse technical components
comprehensively. Also a Multiplayer Online game
is indeed a large application with a lot more
challenges in debugging and quality assurance.
Succeeding in building a reliable one ensures
students to learn the qualities that software
companies want.
3 IMPLEMENTATION
This class was designed for Computer Science senior
and graduate students who completed programming
languages, data structures and Software
Development Principles but not necessarily have
taken elective courses such Software Engineering,
Network nor Database courses. Considering that
majority of students find jobs at industry after
graduation, the class was organized in more of
industrial flavor; a team of students (1) receive tasks
and milestones, (2) achieve the milestones by
actively looking for solutions from any available
resources, (3) interact with other teams
collaboratively, (4) and produce documents for clear
communications between teams and future
extensions.
The class was organized into Game Concept
Design team, Game Server team, Game Client team,
Game protocol team, Database team, Art Support
team, Game Content team, Testing team, and
Launching team. Within first 2 weeks, objectives
and the responsibility of each team were discussed
and then students were assigned into one or two
teams based on their interest and backgrounds. From
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330
then on, teams worked on in parallel to achieve their
milestones, while learning all the required
technology for the given task and sharing their
learning with other teams.
Sample Summary of team tasks is as below.
Game Concept Design Team: this team has most
important initial responsibility. The objective of the
whole class was to build an educational MMORPG
for Computer Science students, especially for
beginners who are taking first programming courses.
The concept design team should consider the
limitations such as time (10 weeks for actual
implementation), lack of artists, and unknown
factors like the potential of other team’s performance.
The team also has to collect everyone’s idea, finalize
the game concept into several milestones and
produce the documentation.
Game Client Team: this team is responsible to
implement 3D game client using Panda3D. Students
have to learn 3D graphics, Panda3D game engine
and Python. Also client communicates with server
using the game protocol to update the status
(position, motions, and levels, etc) of other clients
concurrently in the same virtual space.
Game Server/Protocol Team: this team is
responsible to implement game server that connects
to all the clients, synchronize every client status and
update the Database. Team did not start from scratch
as there was a JAVA game server written for a
similar MMORPG game called “NurseTown” by
students of Internet Application course. The server
team had to read and revise the game server to work
for “deBugger” game. Also the server team has to
develop an effective set of protocols used between
clients and server. Students in this team have to learn
socket programming, client-server architecture, and
Network protocols.
Figure 1: Timelines for each team over weeks during the
semester.
Art Support Team: this team is responsible to
provide 3D models to create the virtual world and
characters in the game. As there are no artists in the
class, this team has to find freely available 3D
models and convert the format to work with
Panda3D. Students in this team have to learn basic
of 3D modeling tools such as Blender or Maya and
converting 3D model formats, and real time
rendering performance trade-off (visual quality vs.
rendering speed).
Game Content Team: “debugger” game is a unique
MMORPG game for educational purpose. Therefore,
the educational game contents are as important as
other game assets. This team develops educational
contents. As senior or graduate students of computer
science, this team is already familiar with
educational contents that beginner programmers
learn which is good and bad. This team needs to
interview beginner students, observe the troubles
that they probably forgot and produce effective
educational contents.
There were a little over 20 students in the class,
so each student choose one primary team and one
secondary team, so each team has at least 2 to 3
students. By having students in a few different teams,
students could learn more than one technical area
and teams can communicate and update the progress
easily. Each team has to work very collaboratively as
the whole class works for one project together.
Important concepts and technologies were taught
to the whole class by several lectures, but most of
class meetings were used as presentation of
milestones, progress, trouble shootings of problems
on hand, so the whole class stays in a same page and
gets exposed to the problem and solutions.
Software Engineering principles have been
practiced throughout the whole course as teams
realized the importance of the inter-team
communications due to the rapid developments in
parallel. Changes in one team did propagate changes
in milestones or requirements in other teams. SVN
was actively used.
4 RESULTS
The whole class successfully developed a working
MMORPG game at both 2009 Fall (DeBugger -
http://smurf.sfsu.edu/~debugger/), 2011 Fall (World
of Balance - http://smurf.sfsu.edu/~wob/) when the
courses were offered in this style, 2013 Spring
(extension of World of Balance game), and 2013
Fall (extension of DeBugger game, California State
Univ. Los Angeles). The games produced by the
TransformingExperienceofComputerScienceSoftwareDevelopmentThroughDevelopingaUsableMultiplayerOnline
GameinOneSemester
331
class had intention to be used for educational game
research or science discovery game research which
added substantial challenges (entertaining while
achieving another purpose) compared to pure
entertainment games. As a whole class, students
have constantly struggled together to validate the
game design for achieving its intended purposes.
Developed games are currently being used as
intended (Yoon et al, 2011; Yoon et al 2013)
DEBUGGER GAME (Educational MMORPG
For Computer Science Students)
Each team achieved milestones close to the
initial (very ambitious) goal. Game concept team
came up with the title, “deBugger” and the theme of
the game; fighting against bugs within inside of
computer, inspired by the origin of the word and the
significance of the word to computer science
students. Team also prioritized concepts in to several
milestones, so kept the milestones doable for one
semester, but left many interesting ideas for future
extensions.
Primary milestone for Fall 2009 was to build
virtual world where players can explore and fight
with bugs by solving multiple choice questions.
Health drops under bug’s attack and game items can
be used to shield from the bug’s attack (delay the
health damage or clear out options from the multiple
selections). Players can level up by solving questions
required by each level. Also player should be able to
chat, create friends’ list and maintain their inventory
(trading or giving gifts).
Art Support Team achieved beyond the
requirement. Students learned 3D modeling tools
and created 3D environments for the game. We used
3D character models from Panda3D repository, but
all the environments (figure 2) were created by art
support team and theme was inspired by movie
Matrix and Tron during inspirational discussions at
class.
Client Team was the largest team and they were
divided into sub teams to be responsible for specific
tasks in parallel. List of such tasks are Registration
Process (Avatar Selection), Login Process, Chat,
Bubbles (translucent panel), Chat Bubbles, Character
Name and Damage Bubbles, Friends, Inventory,
Character Info, Hot keys, Camera control, Character
Movements, Interface (mouse, Keyboard), Collision,
Battle System, NPCs (Non Player Character), Bug
(with AI), Mini maps Client team also achieved
impressive progress of completing all the
requirements and the resulting game client was
reliable and capable of very smooth rendering. Each
task listed above took intensive effort to understand
the technology (3D graphics) to manipulate
Panda3D game engine.
Server team worked hard to make MMORPG game
alive. Server team was able to reuse the majority of
server code built for a game called, “Nursetown” by
Prof. Ilmi Yoon and her graduate students. Server
team had to understand the communication
mechanism and modified DB schema and added lots
of new game protocols.
Game Contents team focused on adding
educational contents into the game. Game contents
team structured pedagogy of computer programming
learning and created quizzes in different levels for
such purpose.
Figure 2: Left: A Scene from the game: NPC (Non Player
Character) requires simple AI to interact with players;
guide players to follow rules of game or inform about
events to participate. Right: A scene from the game: Bugs
are attacking players. Bugs have AI to chase the player,
handle collision and re-spawn.
Data Base team studied design of efficient DB
schema and developed it for debugger game. Team
also installed mySQL server and deploy the data sets.
Testing team was developing a test client that has a
minimal AI to wander around, acts like a usual client
and save the communication log, so we can use the
test client to measure the scalability of the server. In
the middle of the semester, we found that the
debugger game needs a bug server that controls all
the bugs that has AI to attack the player and wander
around the debugger world. Testing team took the
role and successfully completed the creation of the
bug server with the close collaboration with the
client team.
Launching team studied popular MMORPG hosting
company’s web site and designed a web site for the
possible full version of the debugger web site and
implemented core set of it to be able to launch the
game for programming class students (figure 13).
The launching team made a simple web site
(http://smurf.sfsu.edu/~debugger) with link to
download client application (self-extracting installer
for windows), game rules, information of how to get
started, and screen captures.
The class as one whole team completed a
working game (version 0.9) by the end of semester.
The game contained core MMORPG game features.
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332
The client and server connect and communicate in
stable manner. DB stores persistent data. User can
create an account with options of a few characters.
And then user can log in at the location where they
logged out last time. Player can explore the virtual
world starting from a desktop space into the inside
computer world. User can find if friends are logged
in and chat with friends or other players within the
same space. Players can check their game items at
the inventory box, health bar and the current level as
well as their current position at the mini-map. Most
importantly, players can battle with bugs using the
multiple choice questions and the health bar and
level were properly updated.
At the same time, whole class produced one giant
document (437 pages, available at
http://smurf.sfsu.edu/~debugger/download_documen
tation.php) of each team’s work for future
developers who will extend this game to the next
level.
At the Fall 2013, this course was adapted at
CSULA for the first time and the students extended
the DeBugger game by adding multiple mini games
(http://csproject.calstatela.edu:8080/debugger/#/).
Due to the transition from the semester system to
quarter system, there were additional challenges.
Even so, the students’ evaluation shows the effective
learning in large scale projects and communication
skills.
WORLD OF BALANC (Science Discovery
Game for Computational Ecology Research)
This game focuses and extends the scope of
game from simple entertainment or education further
into Gamification or crowd computing that enables
scientific data collection through game play. While
players are playing an ecosystem nurturing game,
they are also producing data that can be
meaningfully used by ecologists (Yoon 2013).
Details of game can be found at the given web site
(http://smurf.sfsu.edu/~wob/). This game project
presented additional challenge of understanding
Figure 3: A Scene from World of Balance Game (Unity3D
Client), showing the biomass of the species within the
game.
computational ecologists’ research agenda to be able
to develop effective science discovery game. The
content team also worked extra hard to connect the
game with computational engine that scientists use
for their research. Over two semesters, game engine
(client side) has been changed from Panda3D to
Unity3D to support multiple platform (iPad,
Windows, etc). The game has been used for
learning/training impact study and play test with 20
players for a week.
5 CONCLUSION AND ON-GOING
WORK
Students were proud of what they achieved in one
semester (15 weeks). Considering that the first few
weeks were used to the introduction to the class and
setting up the team, students had about 2.5 months to
work on the game. To be able to make the
MMORPG game work, each team has to deliver
what they were expected in milestones. It serves as a
good pressure on each team and students
collaborated across team enthusiastically. Most
students put efforts beyond requirements, resulting
in good learning outcome.
This class can serve as a good team project
course for senior students in Computer Science, so
they can taste the industry style problem solving
approach and team work in academic environment.
Also as a by-product, the class produced a usable
game that is currently used in CSc 210 Introduction
to Computer Programming course at SFSU. The
objective of using this game for educating CS
freshman seemed to give pressure to students to
deliver a smoothly working game as their clients are
sitting right next to them, so it lets them alert about
their end user.
The project’s focus is not only producing the end
product, but assessing/evaluating students’ learning
from the experience. We have created rubrics to
measure students learning (Table 1) and plan to
assess and evaluate them thoroughly in Spring 2014.
To be able to replicate the same class in the
future, course material needs to be better collected
and organized. There are hundreds of discussion
threads at iLearn news group that were effective
while being used, but not so organized, so may not
be transferrable to next year class nicely. Inter-team
communications were well captured to be used in the
class for each team progress presentation and
documentations. But inner team communication and
resources were not saved. Each team created very
TransformingExperienceofComputerScienceSoftwareDevelopmentThroughDevelopingaUsableMultiplayerOnline
GameinOneSemester
333
useful resources to be shared within team to learn the
required technology for each team for example,
client team learned Panda3D, Python, collision
handling together helping each other. Same applied
for each team. Vast amount of self study materials
were created by each team. These can be better
managed to be created at wiki, so they can produce
more re-usable study resources.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project is being funded by National Science
Foundation Div. Of Biological Infrastructure, Biological
Databases and Information, NSF DBI- 0543614. Also this
project is recently funded by NSF Transform
Undergraduate Education (TUES) 1140939 for 3 years to
prove the learning efficacy quantitatively and spread
widely.
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Proceedings of the Conference on the Future of
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Jones, R. M., 2000 Design and implementation of
computer games: A capstone course for undergraduate
computer science education. In Proceedings of the 31st
SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science
Education, pages 260–264. ACM Press, 2000.
Mencher, M., 2003 “Get in the Game!,” New Riders
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Moser, 1997 “A fantasy adventure game as a learning
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Parberry, 2001 “Introduction to Computer Game
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T., Paik, J., Yoon, S., Williams, R., Martinez, N.,
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Yoon et al. 2013b Ilmi Yoon, Arno Puder, Gary Ng*,
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Young Kang, “Educational MMORPG for Computer
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APPENDIX
Table 1: Project goals and corresponding assessment mechanism.
Goal 1: Teach students effective communication, presentation and collaboration skills that are often neglected in the
traditional classroom.
Assessment Rubric Assessment Mechanism
Students presentation skills both oral and written
Ability to communicate complex CS concepts
Students ability to work in groups
Organizational skills
Focus of task
Students ability to communicate clearly via exchange
of shared documents and protocols with team members
Students evaluation of skills and competencies via
survey
Interviews and focus group discussion
Classroom observations (via a protocol)
Records of public presentations/journal publications
at conferences and professional meetings
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Table 1: Project goals and corresponding assessment mechanism. (Cont.)
Goal 2: Motivate students to learn essential CS course content through peer interaction and encouragement, thereby
increasing course engagement and making learning experience relevant and fun
Assessment Rubric Assessment Mechanism
Student reflections of their roles
Student reflections of their own learning process
Students skills and strategies to engage in the design and
development process to create and engaging product.
Students’ course satisfaction survey
Interview and focus group discussion
Student self-evaluation
Goal 3: Enable students to produce a robust end product, i.e., a game that can be played by the public and that can be
continuously expanded by other students in successive classes
Assessment Rubric Assessment Mechanism
Students design and development skills
Students critical thinking skills applied to the
development of the game
Student content knowledge
Originality of ideas
Performance evaluation of the game design process
Interview and focus group discussion
Protocol to measure effectiveness of the product
(MMORPG game) developed
Student self-evaluation
Goal 4: Give students insights into the real-world industrial work environment to prepare them to master the
challenges of a CS career
Assessment Rubric Assessment Mechanism
Effectiveness of the class in providing hands-on
experience and skills to succeed in CS career.
Students’ determination to pursue a CS degree
Long-terms career goals in CS or other STEM field
Interview and focus group discussion
Student on-line surveys
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