Forever Odd

This idea came to me one day while I was sitting in my math class waiting for it to start.  I had arrived quite early so I cracked out my PDA and started playing solitaire.  Then I got to thinking, wouldn’t it be neat to create my own card game in which I could make it 1, 2, 3 or perhaps even 4 players, depending on the card game I choose to implement.

With a multiple player card game I would want to implement artificial intelligence (AI), so that the user can choose to play by themselves against the computer or with friends.  The only problem with multiple human players is how I would prevent one player from seeing the other player’s hands.  I would have to set up some sort of system that allows them to toggle between views displaying the hands and hope that they play honest.  For added complexity one could allow for LAN/Internet play, which is something I wouldn’t mind trying to do, but definitely would add a whole new level of complexity as I would have to develop my own protocol, most likely. Even with a one player card game there is underlying logic/AI involved but not to the same degree as they are typically more ‘basic’ games.

I broke down the card games I am considering into two categories, ones which are played just with cards and ones that require a board of some sort for game play.

 A few thoughts on ‘implementation’, that is how I am conceptualizing I’d actually accomplish a card game.  Any game I choose would require a GUI environment for game play.  In the case of the AI, I may have to add an attribute that weights the cards importance, that is which one would be of higher importance to play if it is a legal move.  How I would model the logic behind some of the more ‘complex’ strategy based card games, I am unsure, but that is what doing these projects are about for me, learning something new.

One last thing I am going to mention in this post, which could potentially change as this is just initial thinking, is that if I wanted to allow users to switch between different designs in decks of cards

I have discovered online that there are downloadable decks of cards, under open licensing, which I could potentially use.  That would probably be ideal for me as graphic design is definitely one of my weaker areas.