6002CEM-Mobile-App-Development

Coursework for 6002CEM

Arknights Operator Info Application

Motivation behind the app

Arknights is a mobile gacha game first released in China in 2019, and globally in 2020. Hitting 40 million downloads only 4 months after release, it is often considered one of the biggest gacha games in the world. Contrary to many other gachas, which are usually either pure action games or pure RPGs (role playing games), Arknights employs its gameplay in the tower defense genre. Akin to other popular tower defense mobile games, such as Plants vs Zombies and Bloons TD, the player is tasked with deploying characters (up to 12 per team) in several spots in the map, as they attack enemies that pass by their range, in a generally linear trajectory. It also employs RPG elements, with features such as levels and skills. However, since it is a gacha game, much of the information related to its characters are locked behind a "luck wall". Players seeking to find out what each playable character does need to resort to third party resources. This is crucial because information is everything in Arknights - not only for level completion, but also for making decisions on who to spend your in-game currency on or not. As such, I have decided to employ an information app. This goes hand in hand with Arknights being a mobile game, which means that many players who want to seek out information need to access websites which generally are not optimized for phone usage. Note: Since this application is a small scale project and Arknights get updated very regularly, not every character that exists in the game is present.

Features

This application implements 2 major features: checking operator information, and teambuilding. Checking operator information is done through the Operators tab, which displays many clickable icons of each character available in our database. When pressed, this leads to a page in which we can see more information on the character: its name, rarity, base art, artist, voice actor, and a brief description about the character's backstory.

The teambuilding feature lets any user of the application to create teams of 12 characters. This is done through text input, and is backed up in the database. There are also the options to delete and update these teams. This is important for team planning, since Arknights has a really limited amount of team slots.

Sources consulted:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/maui https://rhodesapi.com/ https://www.youtube.com/@JamesMontemagno https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKjMW6x8OhQ https://supabase.com/docs https://hackernoon.com/creating-a-books-tracker-app-with-net-maui-and-supabase