New game idea....strategy game

Ed_Cheek

Hi all,

I have had my Hydra a couple of days and am almost done reading the book. I have VERY little assembly experience so I plan to spend time this weekend reverse engineering the source on the CD.

I want my first game to be different. I have never been a big arcade game fan. I like strategy games. I have a question for you more experienced guys (particularly Andre') Would it be feasible to do a game such as Checkers or Othello on the Hydra? There wouldn't be any fast moving graphics so I should be able to use EEPROM memory a great deal I would think. There wouldn't be a speed issue transferring data.

This is what I want my first game to be. If anyone can give me some pointers and advice I would really appreciate it. I will post code as I move along. I hope to eventually do a chess game.

Thanks in advance.

Ed Cheek
Kannapolis, NC, USA

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GROWING OLD IS MANDATORY, GROWING UP IS OPTIONAL.

AndreL

Absolutely, in fact, I think strategy games are a lot more fun to code in some sense since you spend a lot of time working on actual compex rules and logic, that's why SPORTS games are VERY challenging. I did a football game once and had to interview a lot of people to get the rules down for the game, there are actually HUNDREDS of rules in football when you get down to all the possible conflict, contradictions, etc. that could potentially happen. Then coding this into the AI and planner was very challenging. But watching the AI play itself and make mistake and get penalized was a lot of fun!

Anyway, I think that you should take a look at our PEG SOLATAIRE as well as our REVERSI games that we made, both good examples of strategy games on the HYDRA.

I think that something that people will actually play as more than a novelty (like a lot of shooter games) would be good. I would shoot for maybe checkers, or black jack, poker, or maybe, chinese checkers, or backgammon. But, you will definitely need to use one of our tile engines to save memory since the frame buffers will kill you for memory. And I would just code the whole thing in SPIN. My hel engine is nice and will work for anything that you can fit within the tile space, ELSE modify it for 8x8 tiles and you will definitely be able to fit everything. Also, on the CD, I will (if I have time put my new single cog tile engine) without sprites that is 8x8 with smooth scrolling. Also, the rem or colin engine can use 2-3 cogs only, and are much higher color/resolution, but more complex to use obviously.

But, when doing games, the trick is to get the game play working then work on the visualization. For example, I was talking to some guys that do NHL 2007 for the PS3 etc. and they code most the game with X's and O's in 2D and then later plug in the 3D engine and graphics, so during game play and AI stuff, they aren't getting caught up with lots of 3D and physics modeling.

Bottom line, you just need to see your game pieces in a strategy type game, make it pretty later.

Andre'

potatohead

Hey, I'll totally play a good Othello game.

There is a version of this, written for KDE, that has top-notch AI. It's open source, so there is plenty of hints there.