Category: Programming

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.

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”

Adding OGG support to Torque 2D

Prior to being released opensource, Torque 2D supported OGG and WAV files. MP3 support wasn’t included because of licensing issues with the MP3 codec. The opensource version of Torque 2D doesn’t include OGG support. So the only audio support was WAV. This is a problem because WAV is a raw format, so having audio of any length was taking up a lot of disk space. I added OGG support back to the engine and will describe the process in this post. I am not adding it back to the Git project because there are probably open source license issues that caused them to remove OGG in the first place. Continue reading “Adding OGG support to Torque 2D”

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”

Torque 2D goes open source

One question that people often ask when they see our games is “How did you make this?” It is a question asked both by people who have very little computer experience and by other professional programmers. When another programmer asks us how we made a game, what they are really asking is: “What set of libraries and code did you start with?” Writing a game (or really any software) is a little like cooking: There are lots of different levels of “from scratch”. Did you buy a pre-made pie and put on the whipped cream? Or did you buy the can of fruit and a crust and bake it? Or did you make your own crust and filling? Or did you harvest the fruit and grind the flour and refine the sugar? Continue reading “Torque 2D goes open source”

Scoring the Nutrition of Foods

Part of the Food Cost Calculator project is to determine the nutritional value of different foods. The program can be used to calculate the cost of a food per calorie or weight. But I also want it to calculate the overall nutritional value of the food and the cost per nutrient.

There are certainly a lot of different opinions about what makes a food healthy. The program will have flexibility for a user to set up the scoring system based on the nutrients available in the USDA database.

One way to score a food is to calculate how much of the recommended vitamins/minerals the food provides. Another thing to consider may be the amount of fat/carbohydrate/protein in the food.

This post will describe the scoring system in the food cost program and how I setup the scoring system for myself.

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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:

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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”