Acorns Away, the fourth weekly game by Sarah Scialli, with lots of code and design help from Jim McCann. Starter code from maze client and server, and helper code the earlier games. Minimal code help from Andrew Friedland and Kevin Li. Minimal code help from cplusplus.com, the SDL tutorials, http://jerome.jouvie.free.fr/OpenGl/Tutorials/Tutorial4.php, code written from 15462, and some reference websites for syntax. Sound player code from http://www.libsdl.org/intro.en/usingsound.html. Art by Sarah Scialli
In this multiplayer game, the players are squirrels trying to bury their acorns and dig up acorns that other squirrels have buried. After three rounds of an acorn being buried, it grows into a tree. The player with the most trees at the end of the game wins.
Each round, the players place one acorn and look for one acorn. Then, if
you found an opponent's acorn, it is added to your pile of acorns to bury.
If you did not find an opponent's acorn, you are given a hint to help you. The hint will tell you if there any of the acorns are in the row or column that you picked. The game ends when all acorns have become trees,
and the player who owns the most trees wins (your trees are green, and anyone else's trees are orange). To run the game, run the mazeserver out of game5Server. Then, in game5, build with jam and run ./AcornsAway
The game is inspired a "fun fact" from a movie theatre slide reel about squirrels' acorns growing into trees. The row and column hints that are given are supposed to be Mastermind like, and help the player develop a strategy. Although I've seen games about finding things, I've not seen a multiplayer game that is meant to be solved like a puzzle where the other players are the ones creating the puzzle. And although the premise is simple, figuring out where the acorns are could require a lot of thought and strategy.
I'm pretty happy with the way the game turned out! I am most happy with the fact that the game plays well- you can switch between rounds and the screen changes intuitively to help you remember what you are supposed to do next. A known problem lies in when the game ends. As it stands, once the last acorn turns into a tree, the game plays through another turn of people finding acorns (despite there not being any on the board), and then tells everyone "Gameover". And also, I wish I had thought of a better way to handle the case of multiple acorns on one square. Right now, the game kicks the acorn placed later off the square with a message "your acorn came unearthed" and gives it back to the player. If I were to redo this game with much more time, perhaps I would make it 3-D, where the player can actually move around a forrest and dig with animations. Perhaps I would add in a depth to the game, so the players could bury their acorns at several different depths. But as the game stands now, it's a great prototype for something more complicated.