This idea started off as a board game idea, until i realized it would be too tedius to start up, so the idea transformed into a simple game...I just want to know if anyone thinks it would be fun.(I haven''t written the game yet...) I''m going to describe the game in terms of the board game (as the computer game would work the same way) Pieces 4 pawns (1 each red, blue, yellow, green) deck of 20 maze cards 100 maze wall pieces ---Each wall piece is 2 grid squares long. 1 game board ---The game board is set up in a 20x20 grid, with the middle 4x4 grid squares representing the goal. Along the grid lines are raised sections to place the walls into. 1 6-sided movement die 1 8-sided maze wall die Set Up Draw a maze card from the deck and set the game board up according to the picture on the face. Each player places thier pawn on the colored space in the 4 corners. (in the computer version the computer can set up the 4 pieces and the goal randomly along with the wall pieces) Goal Be the first person to reach the center of the maze and claim the treasure! Gameplay Players take turns rolling the movement and Wal dice, moving walls and their pawns. A turn consists of 2 phases, the wall manipulation phase and the movement phase. Wall Manipulation Phase The player picks up and rolls the 8 sided wall die. The player may then move any piece on the board that was not moved in the previous round. (a round consists of one turn for each player) For each point on the die a player may move a wall either by sliding one space (1/2 wall length) or rotating it 90 degrees from one of the ends. Any combination of pieces may be moved any number of spaces as long as the movement adds up to the number on the die or less. Two walls may not occupy the same place. A wall may not "push" another wall. Ex Player one gets a 4, he may move one piece 4 times, or 2 pieces Twice, or 4 pieces once. The die is numbered 0,1,1,1,2,2,3,4 Movement phase After the wall phase a player enters the movement phase. The player rolls the movement die (regular six sided die) and moves the number of spaces on the die. If a player cannot move (he is enclosed on all 4 sides by pieces that were moved in the last round) he skips his ENTIRE turn, including the wall phase. Two players may occupy the same space, and therefore do not "jump" spaces or players. The first player to reach the center wins the game.

Interesting Idea. I have one question though: suppose I wall someone in... Wouldn''t they automatically loose then? Since they cannot move and have to skip the wall-moving phase as well, how are they to get out of that situation? Would one of the other players move the wall for them? But in that case, what would be the incentive for one of the other players to do so? Maybe have the four players be in two-person teams, so that when one person on the team gets walled in, the other one can help him out? Then, the goal of the game would be for at least one of the players on the team to get to the center?

Pretty cool idea, though. :b: Once you get this game developed, the next step may be to go 3D? That could be quite a challenge.

well, what happens is that they are only walled in for one turn. They can''t move the walls that turn since they were just moved the round before. Since they can''t move the walls they won''t be able to move. After that turn is over they will be able to move the walls, and will be able to move.

I guess i did make that a little confusing. It was a first draft after all.

Also, to wall someone in, (especially in two players) is difficult as in order to trap them you have to have all 4 walls around them moved during the current round. This keeps them from moving AND moving the walls around them...they are then punished by having to skip thier turn.

Oh and i really don''t see this as being a good game to move into 3D. Yeah the thought of moving around a 3d maze might be cool, but i really want this to have a board game feel. Though making the game isometrically 3d might be a possibility...I guess the first step in anything would be to learn to program .

Oh, certainly, that''s why I said that might be the next step. I think this would be a cool game to make as one of the first attempts, though, since it is fairly easy. However, if you don''t know how to program at all, it might be a good idea to start smaller. Much smaller. Even a simple game like this can become quite a burden and never get finished if it is your very first serious program.

Oh an thanks for the clarification. It makes a lot of sense that only one turn is skipped.

I''ve heard that PONG is an icreadibly difficult game to make if your new in programming...

Pong is the second game I made. The first was a game where there were two ships, and the 2 players could move them and shoot at each other. I made them both in BGI (Borland Graphics Interface). The hardest two things to do in Pong were to make the computer miss and make the ball bounce off the paddle and walls realistically. When you start to make the game, as a novice the most obvious thing to do for the "AI" is to make the x value of the paddle equal the x value of the ball, making it impossible to miss. That''s a mistake you need to avoid...somehow. For the bouncing of the ball, as I recall, I simply made it change x-directions, that is if coming up from the right and hitting the paddle it would it would go down and to the left, etc.

There used to be a board game like this. You draw a tile (which represents a passage) and puts it on the board itself. While doing that, you can actually push other tiles away, sometimes off the board. Meanwhile, your game piece tries to navigate an ever shifting maze of passages. I think it''s called "Maze"...

Warhammer Quest from Games Workshop also use a similar method to facilitate a dungeon crawl.

But this is a great idea for implementing on computers. Easier but more fun than chess! Best of luck!

Since im new to programming, (as in 0 experience), I have two questions that would REALL help me get started here.

First just looking at the basic design, what would be a good language to do this in, and where would be a good place to pick up a book to learn it.

Unless someone would love to program the game for me

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Original post by robert4818
Unless someone would love to program the game for me

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Well, I was actually thinking about coding this game and then not giving you any credit for the idea...

Just kidding, of course.

I don''t know, I strongly believe that when it comes to making games, the following holds very true:

"If you want something done right, do it yourself"

The reason being, when you design a game and then someone else codes it, don''t expect it to be anything like what you imagined. Sure, the rules are going to be similar, but it surely won''t look anything like you thought it would. And in fact, chances are, you aren''t going to like many of the things about the implementation and maybe even think that your idea got butchered.

So, my point is: while you may find someone to code the game for you, it''s far better to do it yourself, just for personal satisfaction.

Now, as far as what language to use and all. C++ is probably the best language to code a game in. However, there are a few problems with it. If you are a total noob, it''s kind of hard to get into it and not screw something up majorly. Also, if you don''t know anything about programming, it''s probably best to start with something less complicated than this game. Trust me, you''ve got to write numerous Hello World applications, and calculators before you can even start thinking about coding this game.

Personal example. I know it''s going to sound extremely geeky, but... The first program I wrote ever was the Hello World, and I was five years old, and I wrote it in GW Basic. Yup, that''s the geeky part. See, the country I was born and grew up in, it''s not the most technologically advanced one around. But my father worked at a university, so he was provided with a computer. It was an old 286 IBM-compatible, IIRC. But see, when he was at work, I was really the only one that could use the computer, because I stayed home alone. But there were no games whatsoever on the computer, and I thought the machine was so cool, that I really wanted to do something. So, at first, my father brought home this program, where you could run it, and then type in some phrase and it would "say" that through the pc speaker. Well, it didn''t speak very clearly, but it still provided me with a few hours of entertainment. Not too many, though, as I started getting bored. Then, I found this exe file called gwbasic. And also my father bought me this book on basic. I still don''t know who came up with the idea for the book, but the point was that it was a book specifically designed for little kids. It had lots of cartoony pictures in it and went over the basic concepts of the BASIC language in a very simple and understandable manner. (That''s how I started learning English, too, because for better understanding, the book said what the basic constructs like "if" meant when translated to my mother-toungue.)

So, any way, at the time I was quite content writing simple programs that simply said "Hello, user", and then the next one would first ask for your name and say hello to you, personally, and then the next one would ask for two numbers and add them up, and then the next one had, *gasp* if statements in it! It would ask a question and give you multiple choices, and then you type in a letter for a choice and it would tell you if you answered it correctly. Only much later did I get more ambitious with my projects, but by then I already had the basic understanding of programming language: like, variables, and if constructs and for loops. Then, I got to school and my informatics teacher asked us all in class if we knew any programming languaes, and I said I knew gw-basic. He laughed at me and said basic was a housewife''s programming language, because she could use it to calculate how much of every ingridient she should put in the soup. But any way, he started teaching us QBasic. What a relief it was not having to number all those bloody lines any more!

Any way, I digress. Like I said, only much later did I get more ambitious with the projects I undertook, but by then I already had some concepts of how stuff works. So, the point of this story is this: you must start small. There is no way around it. The problem starting small is that you are not five years old any more. A program that goes like this:

Hello, what''s your name?
? [pompt]
Hello, [name], let''s play!

Doesn''t provide an hour of entertainment any more. Especially since you have a game in mind. But that is a crucial step. You simply cannot go on to develop graphical applications unless you have a very strong understanding of the very basic concepts of the language, like variables, branching and looping constructs, as well as the more advanced ones, like, arrays, pointers, functions, structures, enumerations, and the even more advanced ones, like, function pointers and trickier class concepts like templates and such. Somthing people don''t seem to understand nowadays is that to write a game, one needs very strong and solid understanding of the language.

So, I suggest you first read some of the on-line tutorials on C++, and then when you understand them all (or are sick and tired of programming so that you don''t want to do it for the life of you), then go out and buy a book. Also, with that knowledge from the tutorials in your head already, you will be able to make an informed choice as to what book you want.