SWATLP was a month and a half, 4 person group project I worked on in my 2nd year at Georgia Tech. We spent about the first week speccing out the entire design. We worked out how our client/server communication protocols and broke up the work into 4 separate parts that would need to integrate smoothly. The separation of tasks required us to have a clear software design and an easy way to integrate the code. We achieved those goals through use of UML and CVS.

The next several weeks of the project involved turning our design documents into Java code and building the art assets we needed. This turned out to be a much larger amount of work than we originally anticipated, mostly because we went above and beyond the scope of the project with our design. On the plus side our code integration went really well, we had very few issues with parts of the code not interacting correctly. This saved us a lot of time, allowing us to finish much more of the game than we otherwise would be able to.

The game is strictly network based, the server handles all of the game logic and pushes out the state of the game to the clients. The clients take the user input and passes it off to the server to be handled. We tested game with up to 6 players at a time, we were more limited with the number of computers we could test from since we never had a high load on the server. The game is a space trading game that also incorporates a top down, scrolling space shooter. The player traveled the universe from planet to planet, buying and selling goods, finding ship upgrades and acquiring new weapons. The items available at each planet, and their prices are based on various parameters including the government type and technology level of the planet.