Games – Page 4 – The Industrious Squirrel

Le Havre – Week 1

I’ve spent about 40 hours working on Le Havre. About half of that time has been spent planning screen layouts and designing graphics for the buildings and ships. Bill came up with the idea to draw all the buildings (even the ones built by the players) in the center area. This keeps the player areas very small and leaves almost all of the screen space for the “town”.

Even with that idea, the space is still quite tight. I’ve had to create a different view of the buildings and ships for each “mode” that they are going to be displayed in to limit their size.

My main accomplishment this week has been coming up with a screen layout that will be able to display everything that the players need to see, and a design of the ships and buildings that will fit into that layout. I am now fairly confident that it will be possible to play this game on the touch table.

Here is the basic layout: Continue reading “Le Havre – Week 1”

Le Havre – Intro

I have started writing a new touch table game based on the board game Le Havre. Le Harve meets a lot of the criteria that I have for converting a board game. It has a long setup time and a lot of pieces are moved around during the game. It doesn’t have any hidden information and has remained popular with our gaming group for several years. It has a single player mode and plays up to five people.

There are two issues with Le Harve that might make it difficult. One is the amount of stuff that needs to be displayed on the screen: During the game, players build quite a few buildings and ships and all of those need to be on the screen. But it is also possible that they wont built anything, so the “building proposal” area also needs to be able to hold all the buildings. The other issue is that there are quite a few buildings that have special rules. In the base game, I count 18 buildings that will need some special code.

I don’t expect to be able to get rights to sell this game. Le Havre is very popular (currently #11) and the amount of money that we could offer wouldn’t be significant to the creator of the board game. However, there is a Java implementation available online already, so I hope to be able to give away the game.

To get a feel for the time involved in making a board game conversion, I am going to make a blog post for every 40 hours that I spend on the game. I’ll describe what I’ve done during that week and the current state of the game.

Conclave of Gamers

We attended the Conclave of Gamers convention in Denver this past weekend. We brought our touch table and were joined by our friend Doug from TouchTableGames.com who brought his newly built touch table. We ran all the games on both tables and had a lot of fun. We got to play all of our games including Power Grid, Fire Platoon and several rounds of Hansa Teutonica.

While this convention was considerably smaller than PAX or GenCon, it was also a lot more relaxed and the attendees were willing to spend more time at our tables. We got to meet with a couple local game developers who may be interested in having Dark Infinity write a touch table version of their games.

The convention was held at a hotel just a few miles from our house, so we were able to take both tables over in our car. Setup and tear down was very quick. Overall it was a great convention and we are looking forward to doing it again next year.

PAX 2014

We attended PAX again this year to demonstrate our games at the Mesa Mundi booth. We had a great time playing our games with the attendees and demonstrating Fire Platoon. The Mesa Mundi booth was larger this year and we had a bigger space and a much larger table.

We were on a 60″ table using the new SensaTouch IR sensor and modular wooden table frame. It did mean that we were standing all weekend, but it was actually easier than sitting and leaving over to touch the coffee-table sized screen we were on last year.

From the time the hall opened at 10, till it closed at 6, we were always busy playing games. We mostly played Pair Soup because it is super easy and cooperative. People could walk up and join a game any time. By the end of the weekend we had played 160 games of Pair Soup. That adds up to about 13 hours! We were really glad to have the new tile sets.

There was an overhead walkway above us, and many people stopped at our booth saying that they had seen the game from above and had to try it out. We also played quite a bit of Fas’Jack, Dungeon Raiders, Got It and Yacht with people who stuck around for a second or third game.

We played several games of Fire Platoon and people seemed to enjoy it. People didn’t have trouble learning the game and controls and the tablets worked well. The WiFi was much better than last year, but it was still hard for some people to connect to the game.

The other quadrants of the booth were occupied by d20 Pro; a system for running a role playing game, another game table running a fast paced competitive game called WhackIt, and a demo of the modular table system.

There are lots more pictures of PAX and a few of Boston in my gallery.

Fire Platoon postmortem

It is a bit early for a postmortem – the game is not really complete and we haven’t released it to the public yet. But the majority of the code is done and I didn’t want to wait to capture both the things that worked well and poorly.

I’ve also been catching up on blogging about my programming projects. I’ve retroactively posted some entries to the date when I did the work. Since that makes it really hard to spot new content, here are links if you are interested:

Continue reading “Fire Platoon postmortem”

Web controls for Fire Platoon

We have decided to move the player controls off the touch table and onto individual web-enabled devices in Fire Platoon. There are a couple reasons for this decision. Most importantly, we didn’t have enough space to put even four player’s controls onto the screen and still have legible icons on the main map of the building. Second, we think that players will feel more connected to their in-game fire fighter if they are holding the controls in their hands. With off-screen controls, we can make the game map bigger and support more players (probably 8)

We are going to use web sockets to send messages between the game and the player’s web clients. Web sockets are now supported by all the web browsers, so anyone with a smartphone or tablet should be able to connect to the game and play without downloading an app. Continue reading “Web controls for Fire Platoon”

Starting Fire Platoon

We have decided to write a real-time cooperative fire fighting game with the new Torque 2D engine. We have written some real-time games for the touch table before, but so far we have only written real-time action games (like Bubble Defender, Space Shooter and TropicalTreasure). Real-time games are a bit harder on the touch table because the touch accuracy and response time is not quite good enough for a game to depend on quick button pressing. This game will not be an action game and will instead be a strategic board game that plays in real-time. Continue reading “Starting Fire Platoon”

Zilch for the touch table

I have been working on a new game for the touch table. It is called Zilch (or Farkle, Greedy Dice or Dice 10000) and it is a “press your luck” style dice game that we often play at the end of a gaming session or while waiting between games. Players roll six dice and can score some or all of their dice. What scores depends on which rules you are playing by; but it at least includes 1s, 5s, and sets of 3+. The scored dice are removed and the player may continue and roll the remaining dice for more points or bank their existing score. If the new dice can’t score anything, the player loses their points and pass the dice. If all the dice score, the player may/must continue and roll all six again.

In my version of the game for the touch table, you can play more than one game at a time so that lots of people are rolling simultaneously. Here 10 players are playing 12 games:

Continue reading “Zilch for the touch table”

Up the River

I have been working on the multitouch games these last couple of weeks. I have started creating a new touch game based on the card games Oh Hell, Get Fred and Wizard. These games are trick taking games where you get points for correctly predicting how many tricks you are going to take. The main goal for this game project is to make an HTML based phone interface for displaying the player’s cards. The player will make their bid and select which card to play from their phone or tablet, while the main screen will show the cards played, bids made, running score, etc.

So far I have the game implemented with the player controls on-screen:

Continue reading “Up the River”

Yacht AI

One of the lessons that we learned from PAX is that it is very nice to be able to switch between a human and AI player while playing the game. The only game that had this feature at PAX was Parcheesi. It made people more likely to start a game since they knew that they could be replaced by a computer player if they got bored or had to leave.

So one of our goals is to update the existing games so that you can switch back and forth between a human and computer player during the game instead of just at startup. Most of the games will be fairly easy to adapt to this system. We generally write the computer players in C++ while the rest of the game logic is in torquescript. This separation has meant that we generally pass everything the AI needs to make a decision each time the AI has to play.

Yacht didn’t have an AI at all, so to adapt it to the new system required me to write a computer player for it.

Continue reading “Yacht AI”