QRZar
MOBILE GAME PLATFORM, 2012
TOPHAT [IE]
QRZar began as an undergraduate project at Trinity College Dublin, aiming to make games more accessible and to simplify production across the many different platforms of smartphone available today. The games industry has always been a high investment affair and million-dollar companies have ruled the roost for years. That’s where QRZar comes in. It’s an open source game and a complete software platform that anyone can utilise and quickly remake into something completely different, but equally as free again.
QRZar is a person vs person game using location and QR codes. It is a tech-focused remake of the classic Assassin/Tag game where you hunt down ‘foes’ in real-world scenarios. At the start of the game you are given a unique QR code, on a t-shirt or sticker. The aim of the game is to tag as many people as you can using the application by aiming the phone at the target’s chest. When you tag someone it updates your score on a central game server which allows everyone else in the game to see your score, as you score.
The simplicity of QRZar and the TopHat platform is that it runs across any platform, either through the system’s apps [iOS, Android and Windows Phone] or through the basic “Mission Control” web interface where spectators can watch games live. It can be scaled from a relatively small example, such as QRZar, to a potential globe-spanning game with thousands of players at any one moment.
"“We felt that considering this project was completely supported by an open, forward-thinking college then this app and all the work we do must benefit more than just our CVs. We wanted sanyone anywhere in the world to be able to start building their particular games [or anything that needs a asynchronous data transfers from mobile devices] from a free highly-developed platform that is completely agnostic to a particular phone or operating system. We are all open source software hobbyists and hope that people start building real applications and games as a result of our work.”"
—tophat [ie]