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I was so excited to see this. A year ago I tried to distill a bunch of popular board games down to discrete rules that could be dropped into a generalized frame
by afpx 9y ago
I was so excited to see this. A year ago I tried to distill a bunch of popular board games down to discrete rules that could be dropped into a generalized framework. I wanted game designers to be able to quickly model and prototype games. I also was interested in games where the players get to evolve the rules over time.
However, it ended up being way harder than I expected. In fact, I tabled it indefinitely because I started to believe that it was just intractable. (That is, trying to conceptualize a game into a discrete rule set is often a lot more work than just implementing it in code.)
I'm glad to see others trying to tackle this. But, I hope they try to implement games that are significantly more complex and sophisticated than tic-tac-toe though. The current code is so simplistic that I can't imagine that it will help much. That is, if I used it, I'd still have to custom-code 99% of the logic. But, at least it's a start.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- TheCowboy 9y agoIt's tempting to take the "abstract all the things" approach when you take a swing at board games. I started down that path, wanted the ability to implement any variation, and it was much more difficult to contain even if just focusing on the card-based "board game" genre. I think if one truly took this approach to the logical end, they would end up creating their own specialized board game programming language.
- lfowles 9y ago> I think if one truly took this approach to the logical end, they would end up creating their own specialized board game programming language. That's what I was planning on saying. A set of discrete rules detailed enough to represent most board games would end up looking a lot like an interpreted programming language.