Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Planning your digital board game
Perhaps you might want to create your own version of one of the classic board or card
games. They look so attractive. But I want to warn you about the possible pitfalls (not
the pitfalls on game cards or boards) but the real-world difficulties you can encounter.
First of all, many classic games are not so easy to code; it is not hard to create logic
for moving game pieces on a board, but it is much more complex to develop a smart
AI for the computer opponent.
It should have very talented prevision to play with a human well, calculating possible
future moves in advance. Sometimes, it is quite impossible or is extremely hard. For
example, Go, on the face of it, is a pretty plain game with simple rules, while in actual
fact, it poses the biggest challenge to programmers to create a proper AI.
Another important aspect is "a place in the sun", there are dozens of good realizations
of classic board games on the App store, and can offer you something new. For ex-
ample, more powerful AI, better graphics (there is a meaning in this, as many talented
applications have smart intellect, but middling artwork), advanced social mechanics
of playing, or unique extensions of gameplay. All these things require a lot of effort
and time, and are therefore very costly. In case you still want to check your program-
ming skills on a classical board game, it is reasonable to choose something easy to
produce. A very good instance is the Reversi game; it has very interesting gameplay
and it was wrongly forgotten. The AI for this game is not complicated to design, so it
is worth working on. Remember that it does not require a lot of graphics but only a
regular background for the game board and two tile textures for game pieces; the first
is black and the second is white.
Of course, you also can try to find something rare and original to work with. For in-
stance, some games from a specific region, for example,
Karnöffel
—one of the oldest
card games, dated and mostly from the German-speaking parts of the Europe. Or my
favorite one, the Scandinavian board game from the 19th century named
Daldøs
; it
features a unique game board that looks like a deck of a sailing vessel with some
squares. The player's goal is to eliminate the opponent's game pieces from the board.
So, insomesense, this isagameabout aboarding attack, true entertainment for mar-
ine pirates! The list of such extraordinary but lesser known games is pretty long; you
only need to search for them carefully.
