Royals is hex board based game along the lines of Sean O’Connor’s Slay or Yiotro’s Antiyoy. Games that I’ve enjoyed now and in the past.

Aside from the challenges I’ve set myself to try some more complex programming with this game I also wanted to create a set of game-play rules as easy to learn as those for Slay and Antiyoy but sophisticated enough to produce a game where the results were not as predetermined as some games get.

This second game gives me the opportunity to build a game with some additional features to improve game play including:

• Network play. Players will be able to connect to local games via wifi or global games via a network server.
• Multi-user games. Players should have the facility to play with a variety of other human players or bots or a mixture of both. Ultimately, I’d like to have the AIs evolved enough such that it isn’t obvious whether you are playing against a bot(s) or other humans. Royal’s version of the Turing test.
• Leader-boards so that players can compete against others.
• Campaign style playing with sets of predetermined maps which the player must defeat in turn.
• User maps and user unit graphics so players can add to the game and express their own creativity and share these with their fellow gamer. I hope to make the game such that it can incorporate player graphics already created for other games and allow players to share their work with the larger community.
• Additional units including ships.
• Alternate game rule sets created by users. Users can define their own games and significantly alter the flavor of the game.
• … and many more features which I haven’t written down yet (or even thought of 😉