Hi. My name''s Bruce and I''m a professional computer programmer. However, I want to shift my focus to games. My main desire is to transfer board games to the computer so that they can be played over the Internet. The specific type of games I want to work on are complex games, mostly military strategy. I am not a game designer--I am a gmae programmer! The games that I wish to work on are games whose rights are owned by other companies. My exact plans with respect to how to work this stumbling block out are not quite yet clear. However, this is a job that I was born to do. Picture the game of Risk. Now picture Axis and Allies. Now picture games that are the next step in complexity---games with 10s, even 100s of pages of rules. These games naturally have a more limited market than the very popular Risk and Axis and Allies. But there IS a market, and I have some ideas for tapping it. I have succeeded in writing a Java application to play one of these games, and I currently run a league of over 20 people who use my program to compete over the Internet. It was a total labor of love, and is 15,000 lines of code long, despite the fact that it only uses scrolling DOS text as an interface. Professional efforts will have to be more polished than this. My question is, what do I need to know to accomplish my goals? My ultimate goal, I guess, would be to have a server similar, say to the Yahoo game site, a site where people can go to play chess, checkers, backgammon, bridge, poker, etc, only using my more complex and eclectic games as their subject matter, How do I tackle this? What language should I be using? Should I be using Java applets to allow players to interface with each other, or should I be distributing copies of software that allow people to find the server, and then hook up and play? What are some good aids that will help me integrate GUI interfaces with my skill in transferring rulebooks into computer code? These games are not action games, so immediate response time is not the most important thing, but I need to be able to incorporate graphic interfaces to display important features of my games including board maps. Can anyone help? I''d sure appreciate anyone kind enough to point me in the right direction so that I can pursue my life''s dream. Thanks, Bruce Wigdor (brucewig@aol.com)

Hmm, interesting question.

Assuming all your games are turned based, and don't rely on a lot of animation, Java is a good choice - you sacrifice speed, but gain portability, and they can play over the web.

Flash *might* also be a good choice, but might not be suited for the type of complex games you're making.

If you decide to go with a downloadable client (IMO, not the best choice), I'd suggest making it using VC++ with MFC. Doing so will allow you to concentrate on the rules and play of the games, instead of developing a slick DirectX GUI for them.

Also, you might be able to get away with using ASP-based web pages, along with a bit of clever image mapping and some java-script. Again, assuming your games are turn based, it might make sense to do the calculations on the server side. The advantages here are web integration, and multiplayer.

Good luck! Hope it helps...


Mason McCuskey
Spin Studios - home of Quaternion, 2000 GDC Indie Games Fest Finalist!
www.spin-studios.com

Edited by - mason on 1/26/00 4:00:02 PM