Category: Multitouch Table

Experimenting with Bluetooth

One of the challenges writing games for the touch-table is handling hidden information. So far we have used two solutions: Physical blinds that rest above the sensor and block the view of the other players, and a touch-to-reveal system where the player blocks the view with their hand and touches the screen to reveal their cards.

Many of our users have smartphones, and I thought that it would make sense to let them use their smartphone for the display of the hidden information. In the past, have experimented with a web based system where the game is hosted on a webpage and played on browsers. This works, but when the game is written in C++ for the touch-table, the game has to send data to the web-server so that the clients can display it. This creates extra overhead and lag.

Instead, I thought it would work better to send the hidden information directly to the phones over bluetooth. So I set out to write a C++ server that would use bluetooth to broadcast data to Android clients. This ended up being more difficult than I expected, but I did get it to work and wanted to post what I have done.

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Integrating Awesomium into Torque

Battle Home, one of the games that MCG is developing for Mesa Mundi, has a lot of options which dramatically change the rules to the game. For previous games, we have created instructions by making one or more graphics in Powerpoint or Photoshop and displaying that  graphic on the screen. For this game, each combination of options was going to require another set of images. It would be much easier if we could create the instructions dynamically based on the options selected.

Enter Awesomium, a C++ library that lets you put the Chrome/webkit web renderer into your application. While it was not trivial to integrate Awesomium into torque it does allow us to display any HTML or public webpage within our games.

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New word game for the touch table

I have almost finished a new game for the touch table. The game is based on the board game “Keesdrow” and is similar enough that I am not going to be selling this game. “Keesdrow” is a word finding game somewhat similar to Boggle, but the board is much bigger and each letter can only be used three times. The first time a letter is used it scores its base value, the second time it scores double and the third time it scores triple. This makes it very important to find words that have repeated letters and use letters that have already been used once or twice.

The most interesting part of this project was the AI. I expected it to play significantly better than it does.

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Electric game for touch-table

We have mostly finished a new board game for the touch table. The game is inspired by Power Grid, but is intended only for use on our own table and will not be for sale.

I am pretty happy with the result. The game plays very fast since you don’t have to worry about setting up, distributing paper money and manipulating the cards. In the original board game, we often needed ‘thinking money’ that we could arrange in piles representing planned expenses. To meet this need in the electronic version, we included a calculator in each player’s area. Hopefully this will be adequate.

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Games for sale!

We have the first set of multi-touch games ready for sale! We are going to be giving away “Bubble Defender” and selling “Concentration Sweep”, “Temple Raiding”, “Yacht” and “Solitaire Dice”. Initially, they will be for sale  at Peau Productions and bundled with tables sold by Mesa Mundi.

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Wiktionary

When creating the Writer’s Block game, I needed a list of valid words. This is a fairly common problem in programming and so I was surprised that I couldn’t find a simple word list available online. There are plenty of online dictionaries, downloadable dictionaries that you have to pay for and word lists without definitions, but I couldn’t find a free downloadable list of words with definitions. Except Wiktionary.

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Writer’s Block

I have been working on a new game for the multitouch table called “Writer’s Block”. In the game, players will compete to find words in a 4×4 or 5×5 grid of letters. 

The players have three minutes to find all the words they can. Words are scored based on length and if multiple players find the same word it scores zero points.

There have a few interesting problems to solve when creating this game:

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Hansa Teutonica – Post Mortum

Hansa Teutonica is nearing completion and I wanted to capture some of the lessons that we learned during development. Overall, the game has turned out to be a much larger project that we originally anticipated. We are very happy with the design that we ended up with and we think that future games can use the same design. The game is currently playable except for placing an office to the side of an exiting city. There are also some user interface improvements to make and quite a bit of testing yet to do. But the majority of the code is done.

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Game day and Action game prototype

We hosted a game day this Saturday and got to show the multi-touch table to our gaming friends. There were about 15 of us and the table was a big hit. We didn’t have Hansa Teutonica complete, but we did have Wits and Wagers, Gem Hoarder, Yahtzee, Texas Holdem, Concentration Sweep, Solitaire Dice, and two action game prototypes. People seemed to enjoy the speed that games of Wits and Wagers and Gem Hoarder could be played compared to the physical versions. And we were surprised by how addictive the action game prototypes were. Even though they lacked a lot of polish and features, they got a lot of play.

We took some video of the action and will get that edited and posted on youtube soon. We wanted to have a video to show off when we pitch game designers on the idea of converting and selling their games. I am planning to contact the designers of “Hansa Teutonica”, “Brass”,  “7 Wonders”, and “The Resistance” this week to see if we can get permission to make their games for the touch table.

On Thursday and Friday of last week I started working on a simple action game to test the responsiveness of the table in a fast paced game. I created a simple game where players use virtual arrow keys to steer a spaceship around a board and fire at the other ships. My first discovery was that it was too hard to release a virtual arrow key. On a physical keyboard it is obvious when you have released a key, but on the virtual keyboard, it seems like the key should be released as soon as your finger comes up off the screen. But with the IR detector above the TV, you have to raise your finger about 1/4″ before the touch is lost. So it would feel like you had stopped pressing a direction, but the game was still registering the touch.

So I replaced the virtual arrow keys with a virtual control wheel where you touch and leave your finger down to steer. The ship turns in the direction that your finger is placed and it’s speed is based on how far your finger is toward the edge. It works significantly better than the keys did, but is still not perfect.

By Saturday, I had two types of weapons, one for taking out shields and the other for damaging hull. When destroyed, the ships would quickly re-spawn.

When we tested the game with the full eight players, we saw some problems with the center player’s touches not being detected. The touch sensor requires visibility to three sides to register, so if there are already touches on both sides, a new touch will not register. To solve this, I will probably need to put the control areas of the center player at a slightly different position than the areas of the left and right players.

Since the game was popular, I will probably add a few more features and polish the graphics. I’ll probably add some obstacles, different ship types/attributes, ship collisions, power-ups and the ability for players to drop out and join the in middle.

Wits and Wagers playable

I have completed the base game of Wits and Wagers. This conversion went fairly smoothly, at least compared to Yacht. I am getting used to the torque scripting language, though there is still a lot to learn.

The login screen is similar to the screen for the Concentration Sweep game that William created. I have added the player colors to the login spots so that you can tell what color you will be during the game. We are planning to have a common login system that will also you to pick a color and enter your name for a high score table.

The game is played in seven rounds. In each round you read a question from the boxed game. Once the question has been read, each player’s region displays a panel to enter their answer:

The player uses the touchscreen to type in their guess and then clicks the ready button. The ready button is a toggle, so if you change your mind before the timer runs out, or everyone else is done, you can flip the toggle and change your guess. In order to make sorting the guesses, I decided to stick with purely numeric guesses. This means that everyone has to use the same units. Most of the time there is no ambiguity about what units to use, but if there are, everyone has to use the same units.

Once all the guesses have been entered, the central area shows the guesses on the payout regions and the player area changes to a betting area. Each player gets a small copy of the central area where they can place their bets. It would have been possible to have everyone drag their bet out to the central area, but with a lot of players there could be finger collisions. We also would like to have the option to make all the bets private.

On this panel, the player selects one of the three chip sizes and then clicks on the guess/bet regions to place a bet. A bet can be moved from one column to another by dragging and also dragged off the area to clear the bet.

While the players are betting, the central area is showing the player’s guesses and the payouts and is being updated with their bets as they are made:

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