Us Versus Them is a game developed at University of Southern California by graduate students from the serious games class and the networked games class. It is an online game experience straight out of the 1950′s centered in the Los Angeles area. The rules of the game are based on the popular Tic Tac Toe, this means that in order to win, a team has to acquire three flag points in a row, obviously, the time is limited, so when a player acquires a flag a countdown starts and the team should acquire the rest of the points quickly.
As a lead network engineer my work was to manage a team of seven network engineers in order to deliver the game on time. For the development of the network module we used an open source middleware called RakNet. The game supports without issues up to eight players around the world, four in each team. All the weapons are replicated correctly in any players’ computer, grenades, acids, shooting.
The development lasted twelve weeks and the game was finally presented to the game industry during Fall Demo Day 2008 at University of Southern California.
