It’s been too long, so I’m diving back into IOS development and making a board game. I have a test app (not even close to the final thing) for working out the UI pieces of the game that I just got to a reasonable baseline (i.e. it builds, runs on iPhone and iPad, and can be OTA updated with TestFlight).

The game is Hnefatafl – not quite an ancestor of chess, but somewhat related. The board is 11×11, and the game is unusual in that it’s an asymmetric game. It’s harder to win as one player than the other.

I first learned about this game through a book (the Mabinogion) that had a reference to a game called Gwyddbwyll (from ‘the dream of rhonabwy’ – see how this crazy stuff all ties together?). Nobody really knows the details of gwyddbwyll, but there’s some reference to say its related to other games from that era – Irish and Welsh, all of which seem to be the asymmetric “save the king” tafl games.

Right now I’m building this on iPad and iPhone, but I’m not sure if I’ll release it under the iPhone – only because the squares are so damned small on that interface. I have a few ideas for how I want to make the interface function, and once I get beyond that I’m going to aim to make it a turn-based multiplayer game using Apple’s GameKit (just an excuse to use the new stuff, course). A multi-player only game seemed kind of limiting though, so I purchased a book on game AI (Artificial Intelligence for games) so that I could make a reasonable single-player game. It’s a darned good book – so we’ll see how I do implementing some of those algorithms in Objective-C. I bought the whole book for Chapter 8 (Board Games), and don’t regret a penny of the purchase.

I’ve been thinking it’s time to cobble another IOS app up for sale, not just fiddle around with open source client apps (which is a lot of the IOS work I’ve been doing lately). So I found a board game idea that I liked, and thought I’d make a stab of doing it – maybe using some of the new IOS5 features for a multiplayer turn-based game.

As I got into the game, noodling on the design and how the interaction would work, I came to the realization that I really would like to have a reasonable single player game as well, and that I didn’t have a clue about how to do board-game AI to make a good game experience.

After looking around through a pile of game AI books, I came across “Artificial Intelligence for Games, Second Edition“. Heavy book, hardback – some $80 if you pick it up outside of Amazon’s discount mechanisms. It looked good after a glance-through and minimal reading, so I took it home to dig in depth. I’m really glad I did!

This book does an excellent job of describing the AI algorithms in pseudo good and good ole english, as opposed to many which seem to be littered with mostly un-parse-able fragments of C++. They reference a number of modern games, but rather than catalog “these used this type of AI, the others didn’t” (which I saw in a number of books), they took some time to explain the tradeoffs in choosing the AI mechanism in the game, even if they didn’t have the “why” of the game designer to pull from.

I liked it enough to put up a review on Amazon, and hey – I’m writing this too. If you’re looking for a good overview of AI algorithms and how they work, I recommend the book.

I ran myself completely down on my extrovert batteries this past week. So far down that I didn’t even leave the house for wanting to avoid all of humanity on Saturday. On Sunday, I relinquished a bit – and at least went to a coffee shop. While I was enjoying the complete anonymity of being alone in a crowd, I decided to take some more time to sketch with my iPad.

And yes, it hasn’t left my side. On of these days Karen might get to use it. Maybe. When I get a 3G version perhaps…

Anyway, it was time for the new experiment! I purchased a pogo stylus for working with the iPad. I originally saw one that an apple employee was using in an Apple Store (she wouldn’t give it to me, strangely enough), but she couldn’t tell me anything about it. I later saw an article from the Brushes help page on it, and went out and ordered one. Since I had the stylus, I wondered how different it would be to sketch with that instead of just my fingers. Pretty good, actually. Although I’ve got to admit I’ve become somewhat of a sucker for pressure sensitivity that you get with a Wacom tablet….

The end result is that you have to press a little harder, so in the end it doesn’t feel like a stylus – or at least not like any medium that you might be used to. There’s no scratch of paper, texture to the draw, and hard or soft and angle doesn’t make a different on an iPad. The good news is that you can see what you’re drawing a little better – as the stylus is about half the width of any finger, if not a bit thinner.

I’m still very much learning to use the application (Brushes) too. I have SketchBook Pro, which is pretty cool too – just haven’t really tried to work with it much yet – focusing on Brushes to start with.

I’ve learned to start sketching with really light opacity and a variety of thicknesses, repeating strokes to firm up lines. I’m also just now starting to get a handle on even the basics of textures with Brushes. It’s super flexible, but that just means I’m super lost right now too. The hardest thing to get used to is slowing down some of my motions, or making sure only the stylus touches – it’s very easy, if you’re a little sloppy with your hands – to make it thing you’re trying to double-tap when hatching a background, or to inadvertently “pinch/zoom” instead of making a stroke. Still, I’m happy with the initial results, even if I have a long way to go to get to the amazing quality of artwork I see others producing out there.