Incorporating Real World Attributes into a Gaming Experience

It is not at all new and unforeseen that games will incorporate real world attributes into the gaming experience to make the game more life like in experience, visuals and other aspects. The majority of games in one way or another take real world data into their gaming experience. This focus on integration of real world and gaming world is not new, it has been happening for quite some time. In recent times this has come under a more rigorous focus, particularly in respect to determining how this so called real world data will be integrated into the gaming experience on diverse platforms. For example, games like FIFA Soccer incorporated real FIFA championship information for the gamers. Obviously, how well the data is connected to the game in providing a simulated real world experience remains crucial for game developers. Let us have a closer look at how at various points of time, levels and genres this data integration takes place.

Source: https://www.easports.com

Integrating and Simulating Game Environment from the World of Sports

Most games fetch real world gaming environment and data from the world of sports on a frequent basis. There is an array of games that serve as prominent testimony to this. A game entitled ‘World Cup Soccer’ or ‘Baseball Championship’ or sports club management games such as Championship Manager or Football Manager offer great examples of real world data integration from the sports arena. In most of these games the data is pushed out via updates. This obviously means that the liveliness of the data in relation to the real sports event depends more on the on-board player actions.

• The sports events directly get into games through simulated experience.
• The sports management and scoring mechanism get into games offering simulated competition and game rewards.
• The player’s actions while playing the game, selecting the level or selecting contestant makes use of fresh real world data.

Source: https://www.easports.com

Integrating Real Time Data into Gaming Experience

Integrating real world data from variety of competitive environments is one thing and incorporating the dimension of real time into the gaming experience is completely a different challenge. There are many great fantasy sports games that incorporate not just real world data but also integrate the real time experience from the outside world. Fulfilling this challenge may be demanding for the game developers but this is equally rewarding as well, especially in regard to the realistic simulation in gaming experience that it facilitates.

• Offering a real time simulation of a real world sports event through your game makes up great fantasy games. For example, a real soccer championship can be modeled into a game creating similar ambiance. Real time experience can be incorporated in various ways. For instance, the gamers can choose their team based on the real life performance of players.
• The challenge involved in meeting the demands of integrating real world as well as real time data into the gaming experience is better met by browser based games. For example, simultaneously inside the game app, real world data like the team that is leading in score can be displayed to get gamers inspired and let them follow the performance of real players and clubs.
• Real time gaming is becoming increasingly popular in emerging platforms such as mobile as strong and connected back-end for facilitating such gaming experience getting momentum.
• Through integrating real world data the game not only becomes more immersive and by further by processing the data for a real time experience the game can becomes a real hit.
• For offering both real world and real time data into the gaming experience a lot of processing is required for the game to make use of consumed data and this makes such a venture really challenging to develop and maintain.

Source: https://www.easports.com

5 Things to consider in real time and real world data integration

Every challenge has its own sides of glory and so it is with the challenge involved in real time integration of the gaming experience. But meeting this challenge and successfully fulfilling the objectives need careful consideration of few aspects. Let us look in to 5 main factors to consider with regards to real time data integration to a game project.

1. Real time is more challenging than non-real time integration

Real time integration requires a lot of granular level processing that makes the game development project harder in comparison to non-real time integration. For example, letting the gamers choose a team of racers or players based upon the real world performance needs real time feedback through a server. Moreover, when integrating real time data the developers are more vulnerable to making errors and this can directly affect the gaming experience.

2. Real time integration demands well structured data

Without a well structured data format it becomes really hard to handle the complexities involved in processing. Absence of an optimized data structure may actually result in post processing issues within the gaming experience. For instance, if a player and their real performance information are being provided it needs to be provided in different parameters to make the choice diverse and multifaceted.

3. Strong exception handling

You must have your apparatus ready for addressing the issues that arise in games. And for this the most important thing is strong exception handling skills. Knowing the process in addressing issues with each set of data would ultimately make it easy to take care of errors. This, also to some extent depends on your use of well structured data for processing.

4. Push the data or pull the data

Technically speaking, deciding on push or pull data largely depends on the gaming project in hand. While pushing data offers real time event driven data integration benefits, pulling data does not offer such integration. Though pulling data can be lot easier but often ends up in making the data integration somewhat bland.

5. Assure bug free gaming

Finally, these are the bugs that make a gaming experience suffer terribly. Debugging tools are must for assuring bug free gaming experience. There can be volumes of faulty server side codes when going through server side processing of files and only a debugging tool can offer you a rescue from such situations.

Integrating real world data coupled up with real time into gaming apps can continue to be popular horizon for developers but ultimate gaming experience depends on how glitch free is your integration.

This article was written by Juned Ahmed who is a digital marketing strategist and IT consultant working with IndianAppDevelopers, a mobile application development company that offers mobile app, web and software solutions. He is specializing in the formation of innovation programs, lead generation, better customer retention and repeat business.

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