Free Agents is a cooperative team based augmented reality location based game that is played both online and in the real world.
It is also a game design and development tool enabled by its integration with the Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) environment.
Free Agents is played by a team of players in the real world directed by a Team Commander situated at an online terminal. The objective is to complete missions through fluid communication and cooperation between all members of a team. Missions are themed in the spy and secret agency genre and often involve tasks such as investigation, exploration, surveillance, decryption/encryption and coercion.
The Team Commander (TC) uses an Online Command System (OCS) to communicate with the ‘agency’, the Centre for Distributed Investigations (CDI), and with team agents in the field. It is the TC’s responsiblity to relay important information between all parties.
During a mission, the OCS allows the TC to: receive mission objectives and to report their status to the CDI, access related maps and dossiers, communicate directly with team agents, and attain more information pertaining to the mission through searching and hacking various data sources.
Certain activities such as hacking are represented abstractly through mini games. The working example above is the OCS Hacking Tool. Connect data sources (yellow) within a certain number of hacking attempts (blue). In your way are security firewalls (red). Click the top-right data source to begin and move your mouse slowly over adjacent squares. Your connection will reset if you go backwards or encounter a firewall.
Team agents in the field can communicate with the TC and each other through a CDI application loaded onto their web enabled mobile devices. This application may also be equipped with mission specific decoding tools such as ciphers and code breakers.
The Free Agents system is largely custom built but its game/scenario logic builder and controller employs the use of the Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) environment.
[SourceForge] YAWL is a Business Process Management/Workflow system. Based on a concise and powerful modelling language, YAWL handles complex data, transformations, integration with organizational resources and Web Service integration. Built in Java, it uses XML Schema and XQuery natively.
The use of YAWL was brought about through a recommendation by the team’s project supervisor, Dr. Ross Brown, who felt that it would be interesting and worthwhile to see if YAWL could be somewhat repurposed/recontextualised for game development purposes.
As a result the team had to learn the technical and design concepts associated with YAWL, and to look into the basic theory behind workflow control. Connectivity between the YAWL system and the Free Agents system was prototyped and tested, and it was discovered to be robust enough to work in collaboration. YAWL would be Free Agent’s game logic controller, but the team also hoped that the YAWL Editor could serve as a kind of game/scenario design tool. This turned out to be very possible (albeit with a few issues) and a full scenario could be designed and implemented for use, entirely within the editor.
Outcomes from YAWL’s use in Free Agents was authored in Dr. Ross Brown‘s paper; Gameplay Workflow: a Distributed Game Control Approach – published by Murdoch University.
DEVELOPMENT SUMMARY
Team: Yang Wong, Shu-Min Heng, David Wallace
As a small team we were all involved in the overall concept, design and documentation of Free Agents.
Year: 2005
Yang Wong
My role as a Technical Developer involved:
- Design/Development of the back end systems
- Research and integration with the YAWL environment
Technology: Java, MySQL, Tomcat, Apache, and YAWL.
Shu-Min Heng
My role was Lead Interface Designer. This included:
- Design/development of the front end OCS interface. This included all of the graphics and programming (excluding mini-games)
Technology: Flash and Photoshop.
LINKS
Free Agents was developed by a small team based in Brisbane, Australia, and supervised by Dr. Ross Brown.
Yet Another Workflow Language – http://www.yawl-system.com
Presentation Poster – http://if90.net/
Research Paper – http://portal.acm.org/