William and I have completed the Yacht game.
It ended up being harder than I expected it to be (which seems to always be the case). There are a lot of different ways that the game can move forward – the timer, the user scoring, or the user saying that they are ready for the next roll. And keeping track of the state of the game and the players we messier than I expected.
I also had trouble organizing and designing my script code. The lack of an enforced structure made it difficult to decide what file/class/namespace would have each bit of logic. Between that and my lack of experience with the script language, I spent a lot of time looking for code and moving things around.
It was also somewhat difficult to get used to the more event and schedule driven game flow. For things to animate nicely, we needed to introduce delays where there normally wouldn’t be. For example, the game rolls the dice, the diceĀ animate, then then game tells the players what the roll was and the player class unlocks the player GUI and displays the ready button. In application software, the dice wouldn’t be animating, and that would all be one flow of function calls. For the game, there had to be a scheduled delay between starting the dice animation and telling the players what the result of the roll was.
Space was also a more limiting factor than we thought it would be. On the 46″ 1920×1080 screen, the smallest button that the user can feel confident pushing on the first try is 32×32. To get things to fit, the scoring regions ended up being only 24 high.
Here is a screen shot of the completed game:
Cool stuff!
Regarding screen real estate issues, how difficult would it be to implement the ability to zoom in on a board game a la the android finger pinch? I imagine for games like Hansa and other conversions where real estate might be more of an issue, this would be nice to have. I don’t have a good concept of how difficult it would be to implement, however.
Ultimately, it would also be really cool if each player “profile section” was like a separate zoomable area of it’s own that the player could control themselves. Almost like embedded independent touch screens within the larger touch screen. Then I could have my own game dashboard where I could bring up the rules of the game, my current position in the game, resources, etc. I imagine a simple version could be had relatively easily with each players section allowing for paging, etc.
I’m sure you’ve thought of this and much more already… just noodling a bit. š
Later!