Roommates is local multiplayer game developed as the final project for the Apple Developer Academy.
every device is treated as the player’s home, and everyone nearby can connect to others’ houses (through bluetooth or wi-fi, so no proper internet connection required!) and play minigames together.
two games were developed for it: Battle Sheep, a pun on battleship games, and Baseball, a timing game.
development halted as the program ended, but the ground was set for more games to come, and more customisation options as well! there’s an in-game store for future items, such as clothes, house items, and, of course, minigames.
behind the scenes, the game uses Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity technology to connect devices. in order to use it properly, a strong abstraction was built on top of it, which we fondly called Par. you don’t see the name in-game, but it’s always there doing the hard work, responsible mainly for hosting minigame servers on one device while exchanging information with the others.
i was responsible for the networking features and basic game flow, as well as illustrating and implementing Battle Sheep.
