So I've been developing in .Net for a number of years now, but a recent freelance project has been presented to me. The project is for one of the UK's leading casinos, and the gaming director has approached me to develop the app.
The app is essentially a multi-user live game (per table) within the casino. There will be a client device for each player and the dealer will also have a device with a slightly different version of the app on. The game, from a players point of view, doesn't need to be too complicated at all, so graphics are not a concern. WPF should be able to do everything I need where the graphics are concerned.
The architecture I initially chose was to use a WCF service (on a central server) with duplex communication to allow the dealer on each table to control the game and update the other clients devices accordingly. There is also the option to maybe use web sockets but I assume WCF will do the trick as long as performance isn't an issue?
The problem I've got with this approach is that Windows 8 tablets aren't cheap, and obviously cost is a major factor in this. Android devices can be purchased at around £50 each which is a hell of a lot cheaper when the amount of devices starts totting up. So I looked into maybe using xamarin, a tool which allows you to write c# for an Android device. But, it doesn't appear to support WCF duplexing, and I would much rather keep everything in Windows as that's where my knowledge lies.
The other option I thought of was to maybe use RemoteApp within Windows Server, and setup a high powered server for Android devices to Remote Desktop into.This way the app could be written in C# and use the full .Net framework along with the WCF duplexing.
I would appreciate any advice on how different developers would go about this project, as you can probably see - game
development is new to me!
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