Crazy Idea: Generic Card-Based-Game-Playing Interface

[SinbadEV]

So I've had this idea bouncing around in my head for a while and it has recently resurfaced due to playing Munchkin Quest for the first time.

The basic premise is rather mundane, create a multi-user interface that tracks the position and orientation of entities and displays them, and allow multiple users to see and change the position and orientation of said entities.

That's it, that would let me play Zombies!!!, Munchkin Quest, Any card-game from Magic the Gathering to Skipbo.

Alright, you have to provide for a few other contingencies obviously, like there would have to be a special "towards player" orientation that would allow a player to look at his own hand but only see how many cards are in an opponents hand. You would need to track ownership of entities so people couldn't move other peoples entities... you'd need entities to have a bunch of properties eventually you'd want to be able to script complex game mechanics to support server side adjudication.

But all in all, with a WHOLE HECK OF A LOT OF work, none of which would be too difficult you could simulate any game on the market but then you would get sued.

So, ideas? suggestions? offers to program it for me out of the kindness of your heart and a mutual passion for playing board games online?

[Pxtl]

Yeah, I've thought of it myself since that first Playstation webcam-based card game came out.

There's a couple of open-sourced games based on this kind of image recognition - you just need a webcam and a printer to play, apparently

http://happypenguin.org/show?levelhead

http://happypenguin.org/show?Powerball

No, I won't help you make it.

And my pick for a game to adapt would be Robo Rally. Munchkin is too much fun in-person.

[BrainDamage]

already done many times, example
http://www.lackeyccg.com/

[SinbadEV]

I hadn't even thought of image recognition. I don't think it would sync well with my idea.

Oh, and robo-rally is most definitely on the list (there is a web-based version, but it sucks and isn't real-time).

I've discussed the idea with a few friends over the years and in my mind and so there's a couple bits of technology I would like to leverage.

First off I would need a Dev+Playing Web Presence like Spring has, aka:
Some kind of Bug-Tracking
Some kind of Web-Enabled Source Control/Code Browser
A Wiki
Forums
Chatroom with server side logging.
RSS output streams for updates to any and all of the above listed features

Then I need an idea for game to start with, examples:

Exactly like roborally, zombies, or munckin quest etc. but with made up IP.

OR

A New game that incorporates all of the features we want to be able to simulate (Decks, Hands, Drawing, Modular Boards, Game Pieces)...

OR

A list of games ranging in complexity like, tic-tac-toe, checkers, chess, solitaire, bridge, risk, TCG-style etc... each adding a new feature.



We would want to incorporate some kind of scripting language early on, a specialized version of LUA, Javascript or C++/# for example.

Front end wise for the game we would want to be able to track games in progress and display them in real-time so AJAX for the client side and then either a constantly running background job updating all active games or new game instance threads... I'm thinking the easiest would be the old load handling trick of frame processing, each game has an update action that get's put into queue after all other active actions, frames are calculated as quickly as possible, user input would be queued aswell and be acted on each game frame, as most games work in turns this should be fast enough to appear real-time.

There would be a standardized entity definition (probably XML), and each card would be stored in a database. When a game instance is running there would be a temporary table of included entities (as IDs and position/orientation/ownership information.

Front end would be nice to be drag and drop, which isn't too hard to do with AJAX.



Inicially I would like the Dev-Side stuff in place, then I would like to get to the point where a user could create a game board and have some simple entities to move around, and other users could see this board and chat using the integrated chat... then we move on to things like ownership etc.


My design doc is my caffeine rattles brain right now... it's patently obvious that I don't know what I'm talking about, which is why a Forum+Versioning System+Wiki would be a great place to start hashing things together with interested parties.

[SinbadEV]

already done many times, example
http://www.lackeyccg.com/

That's not web-based.

I'ma go try it out and see if I can make it do robo-rally.

edit:
OMG That is the second worst one of those I've ever seen...

I'm adding "Useability" and "Simple to Design For" to my list of features.


That's one of the reasons I keep thinking about this, there is no really good one of these out there, though admittedly there are a nearly infinite number of piss poor ones like that one.

SRSLY, Why do programmers hate their users so much that they would completely re-invent every aspect of UI that companies like MAC and Windows have perfected over the years... not say MS and Mac are perfect, but at least Microsoft knows where to put a menu.

[Peet]

I can refute that point with one name, unfortunately.



Office 2007.

[SinbadEV]

I can refute that point with one name, unfortunately.



Office 2007.

I'm still pretending that doesn't exist... if the next version of office doesn't have at least the option of a 2003 style interface I will pretend it doesn't exist either.

[imbaczek]

such software already exists, i've tried playing a game with a friend, but really it's pretty pointless when the computer doesn't enforce the rules. much better to just play in the real world.