Our game is starting to look the part, but when I tried to teach the game to someone new they immediately made an illegal move, taking one of my pieces in the process. The game was an immediate wash and they were not inclined to try again (not to mention the current difficulty of getting a fresh game).
The obvious answer is to permit moves to be undone, and android devices provide a back button we can usurp for that very purpose.
We have our game together and it’s actually playable. To discover the various ways of improving it I suggest you spend some time playing it. If something is less than perfect now, then it will be a fatal frustration for the end user. Happily, we’re still at the glaring omissions stage so I have plenty of material for new posts.
The first interface problem is nothing seems to happen when you make a move until the move is complete, then the piece snaps to position. A more intuitive way of working would be for the piece to follow your finger as you move it, then snap to the grid when you lift your finger. There are two parts to this problem and we’ll deal with the easy one first.
The last step between us and a playable game is being able to move our pieces around. There’s many a slip twixt playable and fun though. After this post you can try playing the game and I assure you it will drive you nuts. We’ll deal with these frustrations over the coming posts.
We often get told the right thing to do which is expedient but it’s not very educational. Why is it the right thing to do? What if the person instructing you is wrong? Sometimes an illuminating method of finding the right solution is to establish a clear idea of the wrong thing to do, then run in the opposite direction as hard as you can.
I’ll post some code. You guys get your trainers on.
If you’ve been following along from the previous post you’ll have screen showing a classic chequered board ready and waiting for pieces to be put on it.
There are several ways to tackle this problem, each with their trade-offs. The method we are going to use is to create a 2d array to represent the board state, and load it with drawable resource IDs. We will be returning to the game after it’s complete to demonstrate other approaches and then we can don the lab coat and start extracting statistics.
If you have followed the previous post you will have a perfectly black screen. This is not terribly exciting so we are going to make our view draw a chessboard pattern.
The current project is a board game called RPS Chess created by a cartoonist called Tailsteak who, among other things, writes Leftover Soup. The rules are einfach enough to be described in a single comic.
To follow along at home, start by creating a new Android project in eclipse. Set up the SDK from the Android development site.
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