Games Posts

  • 03.18.09 Plugging a hole in GameKit (Social Software, Games, Computers)

    The GameKit framework in iPhone OS 3.0 is very interesting to a Bonjour / P2P head like yrs truly. It basically provides a very easy-to-use API for ad-hoc group formation and many-to-many messaging on a local network. Great for games, of course, but also for many other types of social apps. (I just saw a report on a dev forum that somebody had whipped up a basic chat app in about 15 minutes.)

    GameKit uses BlueTooth networking; that lets it work where there’s no WiFi, but it also limits the range. BlueTooth range is just a few meters, whereas a WiFi network connected to an Ethernet subnet can easily cover a whole floor of a building.

    My MYNetwork framework seems like a good way to bridge that gap. The TCP connection classes provide the Bonjour discovery and makes point-to-point connections, and the BLIP protocol lets you send data blobs over those connections.… MORE

  • 12.03.08 Go with AI comes to the iPhone (Games)

    My plea for more iPhone board games is really getting results! Now there’s a Go game with an AI, so I can get my butt spanked in privacy without the humiliation of losing to an actual human (such as my son).

    iGo is pretty good, for $2.99. It supports board sizes from 7×7 to 19×9, and several levels of AI strength in addition to a customizable handicap. There’s even Undo, so I can back-pedal on my lamest moves and try again.… MORE

  • 12.02.08 Games, Games, Games, Games! (Games)
    • A great iPhone board game that isn’t Attax!
    • Can you and your friends survive an hour on a tiny sinking cardboard submarine that’s running out of air and vodka?
    • New developments with the coolest deck of cards no one’s heard of!
    • And the return of Rogue, last seen (by me) on a VAX 11/750!… MORE
  • 11.13.08 Let’s have some different iPhone board games! (Games, Computers)

    I like board games, and I’d like to play some against my iPhone. There are quite a few board games available from the App Store, and even if it’s understandable why most of those play chess or checkers (which I dislike), most of the rest are still repeating the same few lesser-known games, like Ataxx. These are great games, but do we need five implementations of each?

    On the assumption that these developers just haven’t heard of the wealth of abstract boardgames out there for the implementing, I’ve put together some bookmarks to websites describing literally hundreds of them. Bon appetit! (Even if you’re not a game developer, most of these games are easy to play with boards you either have already or can print out.)… MORE

  • 08.03.08 Quäsenbö: a new Decktet game (Games)

    I hung out with Ricci this afternoon. I brought along my Decktet, and we tried some of the games, then decided to make up one of our own. I suggested adapting Crazy Eights to this weird double-suited deck; a direct adaptation didn’t do too well on its own (it was too easy to get rid of cards), but Ricci had an idea that worked brilliantly, of incurring penalties for repeating suits.

    Then I came home and wrote down the rules … Give it a try! (Don’t believe a word of the historical background, though! I just made it up, and stole the great nonsense word “quäsenbö” from an old Roz Chast cartoon.)… MORE

  • 08.03.08 That New-Cards Smell (Games)

    My Decktet is a thing of beauty. I even printed & assembled the box (an activity that took me back to my happy childhood days of making paper polyhedra models.)

    The only problem is that the cards still have a faint sickly-sweet stink of toluene and acetone (from the plastic coating) even after I left them spread out on the floor for a few days. It’s quite unpleasant, not like the nice smell of new books, cars or boardgames.

    Is this the papercraft equivalent of “Code Smell”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell?… MORE

  • 08.01.08 I Made A Decktet (Games)

    Sometimes it’s nice to make physical objects. It’s usually messier and more time-consuming than doing it on the computer, but in the end you have something you can actually touch.

    … MORE

  • 07.14.08 Testers Wanted (Me, Games, Computers)

    I need a few brave people to test a pre-beta app for me. No, this is not Cloudy; it’s another app I’ve been working on in parallel. It’s called Your Move, and it’s the expanded version of my GeekGameBoard sample code. It lets you play board games against a human opponent; either at the same machine, over a local network, or by sending moves via email or iChat.… MORE

  • 03.07.08 GeekGameBoard — Getting closer to iPhone-ready (Games, Computers)

    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.

    … MORE

  • 12.20.07 GeekGameBoard (Games, Computers)

    Santa has an early Xmas present for all you good Leopard programmers: GeekGameBoard, a new piece of sample code by the anonymous engineer elves at Apple.

    GeekGameBoard is an example of using Core Animation to present the user interface of a board or card game. It implements a small framework for implementing such games, with domain-specific classes like “Grid” and “Piece”, and examples of several game definitions built on top of the framework.
    Some of the … MORE
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