Thursday 10 October 2013

Starship Raiders - an electronic enhancement to board games

While we've been putting together double-sided PCBs for our electronically enhanced board game prototype, and painting miniatures for forthcoming publicity shots, it's not been all fun, fun, fun. In between the light being too bad for painting in the evenings, and the latest stuff from Farnell still not having arrived, we've been cranking out some code too. Using - what else, but - Adobe Flash CC?

Here's a quick run-through video of development to date.
It's all looking quite exciting and using this new digitally enhanced method of playing boardgames, we'll be able to offer:

  • Play over the net with anyone
  • True hidden movement (so your opponent can't see you setting up your ambush ahead of time)
  • Have multiple games on the go at once
  • No tracking hit points, health etc with onboard markers or scraps of paper
  • No more buckets-of-dice-rolls, long-winded arithmetic or looking up results in tomes and tomes of results tables
  • Fast, frantic playing pace
  • Sound effects and atmospheric background music

Obviously the usual caveats are in place - crappy coder art and images "borrowed" from Google Images need to be replaced, interface needs smartening up etc. - but the functionality so far is looking very encouraging...


With a bit of imagination, it's possible to see how the same mechanics could be adjusted for just about any board game type - sports simulator, dungeon adventure, even some of the old classics like Monopoly or chess!

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