From the lab

Location-based games didn't stop at Pokémon GO! Virtual Fence is a mobile multiplayer game where you move around in the physical world and collaborate with your teammates to beat your opponent. Your own, as well as your teammates positions, form a polygon on the map and the goal of the game is to completely enclose the opponent team's polygon. When a new game starts, each player selects a team and a map is displayed, showing the location of each game participant. By moving faster and farther the teams avoid being enclosed by the opponent team and instead increase the chance of winning the game themselves by enclosing the enemy polygon.

For prototyping the game we wrote a server in Golang, making use of the way the go programming language handles concurrency when dealing with multiple players sending their position and receiving the position of other players in the game.

The app was made using Facebook's React Native, enabling us to have a prototype up and running on both Android and iOS devices quickly. React Native also proved to be a good fit for extensive use of native maps in Android and iOS, this mainly due to the great work of Airbnb developing a great open-source library for maps in React Native.