I did a little experiment last night using Processing, which is a Java-based visual programming environment that I've repeatedly run into in various different contexts, but had never really done anything with. I've become completely addicted to Galcon Lite on my iPhone, and figured it was a "sample" to build with Processing. Note that I was not attempting to replicate the look and feel of the game, just the mechanics. If you don't know Galcon, here's a screenshot:
The basic idea is that you take over planets (which produce more ships), and try to exterminate your opponent (which I'm moments away from doing). The green planets are mine, the grey planets are neutral, and the orange is my opponent. Here's a similar just-about-to-win screencapture from my version of the game:
Rather than have masses of ship icons, I grouped them into fleets (the hollow circles) with the number of ships indicated. Notice that I also don't make my fleets go around other planets, as evidenced by the "26″ fleet going through the "19″ planet right in the middle. Gameplay, however, is basically identical to the original.
I made the code available on GitHub: http://github.com/barneyb/GalConvict. It's hardly the Mona Lisa. I made exactly zero effort to architect, refactor, etc. It was just a proof of concept for playing with Processing. [2010-05-17: This has been retracted - read why]
Comments are closed.