02 May 2008

Phone Fight
Hack and slash-em-up with your katana phone!

This is definitely not the best fighting game that I have ever tried and it is nothing compared to sword fights on the Nintendo Wii but it is still somehow special because it offers a freedom of swinging the sword around freely and allows you to hack and slash your friends with your katana phone.

Phone Fight is a prototype multiplayer sword-fighting game that is probably inspired by the cute light shaper application, where the fighting is controlled by an intuitive motion based control system that gives you unlimited control over the every swing and of course every swing has the cool and pretty realistic sound effects.

It makes use of the accelerometer within the phones to detect simulated sword slashes and blocks, and Bluetooth to communicate those moves between the phones and to notify the winning player of victory.

The whole game was conceived and coded (hacked) in Python for about twelve hours by a team from lastminute.com labs over the course of the Over the Air event held at Imperial College in London on April 4th-5th 2008

Installation

Please see the INSTALL file for detailed instructions on how to install Phone Fight. Please note that this is a prototype rather than a fully packaged standalone program, so an amount of technical knowledge is required to set it up.

In particular, there are some prerequisites to install, and some editing of the fight.py Python script may be necessary to add the bluetooth addresses of the participating phones.

How to play

Please see the file PLAYING for instructions on how to play the game.

Safety

Remember to stand well back from your opponent when playing. We know to our cost that it is easy to damage your phone in the heat of battle. It may also be wise to use a wrist strap. lastminute.com are not liable for any damage you cause to yourself, your phone or anything else when playing Phone Fight.

Compatibility

The game has been tested on the original Nokia N95 and the 8GB model and is known to work (mostly). It may work on similar models such as the N82.

Bugs:

Both players must give the same answer to the question 'Play again? Yes/No'. Failure to do so will cause the script to crash. The inter-phone protocol needs to be extended to negotiate this. There probably plenty of other bugs. Beware.

Workarounds:

We have found the Python S60 socket.bt_discover() call to be faulty. It causes the Python interpreter to crash. To avoid this, we have added the facility to hard-code a list of phone bluetooth addresses in the script. To use this facility, amend the script to contain the correct names and bluetooth addresses for your group of phone fighters, then answer 'No' when the challenger is prompted with 'Discover automatically?'

Gameplay inadequacies:

• The program knows about re-orientation of the phone a short while
  after it happens, leading to unexpectedly (un)successful attacks.
• Each player is essentially defending all the time (either
  horizontally or vertically).
• The application is not very pretty to look at.
• This isn't really a very good simulation of a sword fight. It's
  still fun, though.

Potential improvements

• As well as fixing the above, the following are areas which could be
  improved
• Add new sound effects for new types of sword (wooden sword, photon sword...)
• Add a graphical element to the game (perhaps a health bar)
• Incorporate GPS, camera and network functionality...

Program copyright
Phone Fight is Free software and is Copyright (C) 2008 lastminute.com of 39 Victoria Street, London, United Kingdom SW1H 0EU We offer it in the hope that it will be interesting and entertaining, but we provide no warranties of any kind. You may copy, modify and redistribute the program under the terms of the GNU General Public Licence, version 2. You will find a copy of the licence in the GPL file.