The Paper - Page 15 - Conclusion

The Workflow of C++ Game-Development on a Series 60 Platform device

Andreas Jakl, Revision 1.0, July 2004

Chapter 5 – Conclusion and future work

5.1 Next steps in development

5.1.1 Game play improvements

The main purpose of the game presented in this paper is to demonstrate some aspects of Symbian OS and Series 60 coding. To publish the game, more interactivity would have to be added. The player should not be forced to go to the locations one after another but be able to move freely around, have an inventory and generally more freedom in what to do.

In games, it is generally good to have your own graphical menu instead of using the default menu provided by Symbian OS [13]. This would also be one of the next steps in the development of The Journey. Of course the general appearance of the game could be enhanced by using sound effects or a custom font [12].

5.1.2 Location-based extensions

In the current version of the game, only the movements of the person playing are tracked. Even more interesting would be to connect it with real locations. However, this would require finding and writing down cell-ids for every city and network provider. Additionally, cells are rather large. Network operators are able to detect a more accurate position by not only analyzing the id of the strongest signal, but also of the other base stations near the mobile phone. This, connected with their internal database of base stations, enables real position detection. Unfortunately, through Series 60 it is only possible to get the ID of the nearest mast. Also, the databases with the location of the cell ids are not public. A game like that would therefore require the cooperation of network operators.

In the future, a game with this concept will be interesting when the assisted global positioning system (A-GPS) is more widely available in mobile phones. This would allow an accurate detection of the position of the phone. Coupled with location of companies this would also be an interesting alternative for marketing activities.

5.2 Conclusion

The mobile telecommunications world is progressing fast. There has not been much time between the introduction of color screens and the first 3D games for mobile phones. Comparing that to the world of the traditional PC, which also had a quick development, this is even more fascinating. It requires daily work to be able to keep up with the latest developments in this sector.

This does not leave much time to produce a lot of documentation; it took quite a while until the first Symbian OS book was released. When developing, it is not uncommon to spend a lot of time researching on the Internet how to use certain functions.

With more and more examples becoming available to the developer community, this process is slowly becoming easier. This paper provides an introduction for several aspects of Symbian OS and Series 60, and also tries to help by presenting several workflow tactics and tools. Instead of finding those by chance over time during development, an overview is given in one convenient place: this paper.

Chapter 6 – The full code

The full source code of the location based adventure game called “The Journey” is available at:
http://journey.mopius.com/paper/

Chapter 7 – The author

Andreas Jakl is a student of Multimedia Technology and Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria . His first project in the mobile sector was a game demonstrating the brand-new A-GPS system for Comneon/Infineon. Fascinated by the possibilities of the mobile world, he decided to go to Siemens Mobile for his internship. During that time, he got in contact with Symbian OS. He was involved in several exciting projects for Siemens, including the development of an innovative 3D game or a Bluetooth/GPRS-solution. Now he is studying for the Master's degree and wants to further specialize on programming for mobile phones.

More about previous projects as well as the contact address can be found at:
http://gallery.schlabo.com/