A Distributed Game Engine for Mobile Games on the Android Platform

In the last few years we have witnessed a tremendous change in the way game developers are required to deal with software production. We moved from small groups building the application ground-up to large coordinated teams with hierarchical organisation. To support this transformation, game developers are now using integrated development and execution environments called game engines. Among all possible gaming platforms, mobile ones are proving to be a challenging ground due to their intrinsic requirement for game engines to deploy the final application on a distributed system. In this paper we discuss about requirements for next-generation game engines for mobile devices. In particular, we propose a variation of the standard approach for game engines architecture pushing from a monolithic architecture toward a distributed one. In our solution, the mobile game engine becomes modular and lower the distinction between client and server side.