Ten years ago, Owen Brand proposed a 30-line programming contest on the AtariAge TI99/4A forums. I had this idea for a little game, sort of like Stratego, but able to be packed into a small amount of code. I thought making AI for it would be a matter of a few simple formulations, and I could knock it out over a weekend.
That idea quickly grew out of the 30-line restriction, and once I got the 2-player version finished (and exhaustively play-tested -- my son, who doesn't care for retro gaming, loved this one), I got frustrated trying to design the AI. I eventually quit working on it, going back a couple times a year to poke the code with a stick and see if I could remember what I'd been doing when I wrote it.
I finally tackled the game again in earnest a few months ago, relearned the methods to 2010 Me's madness, and now it's about to be released. The AI still needs a few tweaks, but I can stay with conviction that this is the most play-tested game I've ever released -- I've played hundreds of games with it. Once the AI was decent, I got a bunch of matches in, and I still have a lot of fun with it.
The game is sort of a hybrid of Stratego, Risk, and checkers. You get pawns across the board, and stop your opponent from doing the same, and your pawns are represented by numerals that designate their point value. It's a pretty Pyrrhic game -- oftentimes it ends with winning scores in the single digits.
I can't wait to get the final version uploaded and get to work on something else. Patching new code into old is a mess, and I'm thrilled to start a new project from scratch, but I've learned more from Enemy Lines than any other game I've made so far, and I think it's the best thing I've come up with to date. We'll see if you agree!
That idea quickly grew out of the 30-line restriction, and once I got the 2-player version finished (and exhaustively play-tested -- my son, who doesn't care for retro gaming, loved this one), I got frustrated trying to design the AI. I eventually quit working on it, going back a couple times a year to poke the code with a stick and see if I could remember what I'd been doing when I wrote it.
I finally tackled the game again in earnest a few months ago, relearned the methods to 2010 Me's madness, and now it's about to be released. The AI still needs a few tweaks, but I can stay with conviction that this is the most play-tested game I've ever released -- I've played hundreds of games with it. Once the AI was decent, I got a bunch of matches in, and I still have a lot of fun with it.
The game is sort of a hybrid of Stratego, Risk, and checkers. You get pawns across the board, and stop your opponent from doing the same, and your pawns are represented by numerals that designate their point value. It's a pretty Pyrrhic game -- oftentimes it ends with winning scores in the single digits.
I can't wait to get the final version uploaded and get to work on something else. Patching new code into old is a mess, and I'm thrilled to start a new project from scratch, but I've learned more from Enemy Lines than any other game I've made so far, and I think it's the best thing I've come up with to date. We'll see if you agree!
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