GeekGameBoard — Getting closer to iPhone-ready

To encourage development, I’ve started an open source project based on the GeekGameBoard game-development sample code that Apple published last December (which, by a strange coincidence, I wrote.) I hope to have it ready for iPhone game development soon.

You can browse the Mercurial repository online, or download the current source code. It’s BSD-licensed, and your contributions are of course welcome (emailed patches are preferred.)

The changes since Apple’s original sample-code release are:

It no longer requires garbage collection. I love GC, but it’s not supported on the iPhone, where I am definitely planning to use GGB.
I fixed some memory leaks of CoreGraphics objects.
I fixed an assertion-failure when kinging a checker.

What Is GeekGameBoard?

GeekGameBoard is a small Objective-C framework for implementing the user interface of a board or card game. Many games can be implemented in less than 150 lines of code.

It also demonstrates generally-useful Core Animation techniques like:

Hit testing
Dragging CALayers with the mouse
Loading images from files and setting them as layer contents
3D “card-flip” animations

Framework classes include Bit, Piece, PlayingCard, HexGrid and more. It comes with sample games from Klondike solitaire to Checkers and even Tic-Tac-Toe. It’s all ready for you to add AI, network play, new game definitions…

GeekGameBoard runs on Mac OS X 10.5 or later. iPhone support is coming soon.

Klondike

Hexchequer

Pssst! Game Pieces!

Icon websites like IconFactory, InterfaceLift and DeviantArt are great places to get artwork for game pieces. (My personal favorite game pieces are Ginko’s Icons, shown on the right.) Just be aware that most icons, even if freeware, require you to get the copyright holder’s permission for anything other than personal use.

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By: Jens Alfke
On: March 7, 2008
at: 1:33 pm
As: Games, Computers
See: 7 comments;
Add: your comment

About

This is the blog of Jens Alfke.

Introverted, intuitive, thinking, perceiving. I live to make things: most often software, sometimes designs or mixes or stories or photos. (I wish I could make music.)

Father, husband. My home is a nest of family. Outside is overrun with flowers and vines and shade trees, inside with books and CDs and kids’ drawings and game pieces and game cartridges.

Worker, dreamer. I’m driven by visions of things that could be.

h3. Contact

Send friendly correspondence to thought-palace at this domain.

On Fri, Mar 7 at 4pm,
Chris Ryland said —

Jens—How did you end up writing GGB for Apple? I thought you were working on the PubSub stuff near the end of your tenure. Just curious.

Looking forward to the iPhone version!

Also, how can you make this an OSS project, if it’s an Apple dev example? Is their license that lenient?

On Fri, Mar 7 at 4pm,
Jens Alfke said —

I wrote GGB in my spare time (especially over Thanksgiving) and submitted it to ADC as sample code.

Yes, the license really is that lenient. More so than BSD, even. All it says is that, if you distribute an unmodified version of the source code, you have to retain their copyright notice. And my new version has been modified, of course.

On Fri, Mar 7 at 6pm,
Joe Heck said —

Jens — I’m a little new to Mercurial - is there a way to use “hg pull” with your site to get the latest and greatest as you update it?

On Sat, Mar 8 at 7am,
http://weebull.myopenid.com/ said —

You should be able to ‘hg clone http://mooseyard.com/hg/hgwebdir.cgi/GeekGameBoard/‘ and then just ‘hg pull’ )to get the changesets) and ‘hg update’ (to update your working directory to the latest tip) when you want new versions.

On Wed, Mar 19 at 5am,
Floroskop said —

Hello!
I think this try.

On Wed, May 7 at 3am,
Kevin Doughty said —

I am implementing chess for the GGB. I’ve got the basics down, but I might need to email you with some questions if you don’t mind.

On Wed, May 7 at 7am,
Jens Alfke said —

Kevin — Cool. Feel free to ask (email jens at this domain.)

GeekGameBoard — Getting closer to iPhone-ready

What Is GeekGameBoard?

Pssst! Game Pieces!

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