Rolling in Banff is a mobile game which uses GPS to locate the player’s position in real life when standing in the grounds of the Banff Centre. On the mobile phone screen the player will see a map of the Banff Centre and their position on it. On the Banff Centre map there is a virtual ball and hole. The aim of the game is to walk or run towards the virtual ball and hit it into the hole. The speed or direction of the ball is determined by the speed and direction of the player when they hit the ball. The speed of the player is displayed on the bottom left of the screen. At first the ball is at a specified location quite near the hole which means the player can hit the ball into the hole easily and this gives them a good idea of how the game works. After this the ball will randomly generate anywhere on the map. There is a time limit for hitting the ball which means the player has ten minutes to run to the ball. Every time the ball is hit; one extra minute will be added to the time out. After time is out one life will be lost and the location of the ball will be regenerated. The lives are shown on the top left of the screen. At the start of the game the player has three lives. The game will ends when all lives are lost. During the game there are other virtual icons on the map which the player can eat. The status of the icon will be displayed on the right bottom of the game screen when the player reaches it on the map.
The Rolling in Banff game will run on any mobile phone which supports JSR-179 which is a locative Java library of code for mobile phone software design. The game currently only uses the map of the Banff Centre. There are two versions of the game, one for the non-touch screen and one if for a touch screen device.
This is what Evan and Lam said about how they came up with the idea for the game and how they would like to develop the game in the future.

“We were working in the mobile lab in the Banff Centre. Mobiles are popular devices nowadays and they are more than communication devices. GPS, camera and music players are added as well as a cell phone. Therefore, they have a lot of potential for developing. After we saw the pervious projects in the Mobile Lab, we decide to develop an application using the GPS. We think we can do something to interact with users with the GPS devices. When hiking around Banff we came up with the idea. We want to encourage people to explore more in Banff so we developed a game to bring players to somewhere they may have never been before.
It was our first time developing a mobile application with a GPS. We read many documents and examples about the J2ME programming and the usage of the GPS device. To build up our own source code, we tried to use the J2ME location library and found it hard to deal with the new programming tool and devices. With the ART Mobile Lab’s help and after reading some examples and open source code, we developed the base system of our game. Then, we tried to learn more about how to develop the Graphic User Interface. The J2ME Graphic system is a little bit different from Java SE which we learnt before. Therefore, we needed to take some time to get familiar with it. After building all the pieces for the game, we started to develop the multi-player game which is another new milepost for the project.
In the future, we would like to improve the graphic user interface of the game. Maybe a quick tutorial or some guides can be added to the game so that the user can be more familiar with the game at the start. Also, we would like to develop the game map for more game location or find some method to let users play the game in more places about the world. For the multi-player game, it is not so mature. We may improve capacity of the application on the server side. We hope that the sever side can be used to hold multi games at the same time and client can connect to the server and watch different games from their home.”
Evan and Lam now hope to make the source code for the game available on the internet to enable other developers who wish to develop the game further an opportunity to do so. Until the game is available on-line, players can experience the game at the ART Mobile Lab and we also have the source code here for any developers interested in advancing the game. Evan and Lam are now back in Hong Kong continuing their final year studies of their degrees. ART Mobile Lab would like to thank them for their valuable contribution and wish them every success for their future.