I was introduced to the board & card game combo Dirty Marbles years ago by friends of the family. Being a lover of board and card games I fell in love with the game almost instantly. The game is played using a board similar to the one displayed at the end of this post and a regular deck of 52 playing cards. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to play in years, though I still talk about the game, due to not having a board. Thus, I thought it would be an interesting project to develop the game myself with the networking/multiplayer component. Since this thought first occurred to me back in 2014 I now have different ideas for implementation, like perhaps as an iOS app, Android app and/or desktop application for greater flexibility in play, but also added complexity (mainly because I’m still learning iOS and thus only have a faint idea as to what I would need to do for notifications).
My initial thoughts on a starting point were as follows:
- Console app first
- Multiplayer, on a single machine
- Prints:
- ‘-‘ for empty slots
- First letter of colour for player marbles, followed by num so can choose the one to play???
- View:
- P to print board
- H to print hand contents of human players
- M to move, ask for card and marble num, move if valid and print board or error message otherwise
Of course that is but the tip of the iceberg and some key features I want to implement include:
- Graphical User Interface
- Multiplayer, network play
- Save/Load Games
- Difficulty levels (Artificial Intelligence)
Now I am thinking of still getting the logic down first but doing an implementation for iOS and/or a Windows C# application first. When I will actually get to start this I do not know as I currently have other projects preceding this one. I don’t expect that I will implement every idea but I wanted to put this one out there, finally as it’s been in draft since 2014, for if I’m ever lacking in projects or have an over abundance of free time. 🙂
If you are curious to check out my most active project right now, which isn’t in the development realm but hands on building, is building a Sig 4 Star 60 which you can check out.