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:
Since there are lots of games with this basic rule set (see the Wikipedia entry for Oh Hell) I have made the game very flexible. The intro/login screen is a bit overwhelming with all the options:
The next step is to start making the HTML interface and to do more testing of the different options. I’d also like to make an AI that can do more than play randomly.
I have also been re-visiting all the old games and updating them with our newest coding conventions and systems. As we have created more touch games, we have created a set of standards and utility functions that make coding faster and easier. Some of the first games that we made used very different systems for things like handling touch input, making a copy of the interface for each player, saving preferences, doing splash screens, etc.
It took almost a week to revisit all my old games and update them with our latest code. Hopefully that work will make it easier to upgrade those games and will allow us to apply more bug fixes to all the games at once.