Chinese checkers on a spherical board

Do you like board games ? Do you like to experiment new game concepts ?

If you answered yes to one of these questions, I think you will appreciate this article. Indeed, here I offer you a variation of the chinese checkers game... on a spherical board ! This was already done for chess, but I think it is the first time for chinese checkers. So, just stop to speak now and have a game.

Choose to play against a friend on the same computer (Human VS Human), against the machine (Human VS AI), or just see the machine against herself. Then, drag the screen to navigate around the sphere and just follow instructions :

Content displayed within Unity Web Player

This project was a good opportunity for me to learn more about Unity 3D, C#, data structures and IA.

First I built the board in 3D Studio Max (from the geosphere primitive) and then I imported it into Unity. The most boring part in my C# code was to write a parser able to analyze the mesh board structure and generate automatically the core graph data structure. Indeed, it was out of question to generate the graph structure "by hand" ; I wanted a flexible solution, able to work quickly with new board designs without any long and boring new configurations. So maybe the next version of the game will offer you a large set of original boards, with some strange topologies...

Then I built my game code following a very simple MVC pattern. If you are curious about how we can apply MVC to board games, I think it will be interesting for you to look into my package structure. Maybe you could think that this is a very large package for such a simple game, but I always work in a way that allow me to extend my projects. Here my package structure is suitable to add new boards, new AI, new game modes...

• [_] chineseCheckers
• [_] controlers
• [_] ai
• AIControler
• DistanceTable
• [_] human
• HumanControler
• AbstractControler
• MoveData
• [_] data
• CellData
• DataManager
• [_] games
• AbstractGame
• AIVsAIGame
• HumanVsAIGame
• HumanVsHumanGame
• [_] gui
• [_] elements
• InGameHud
• Menu
• GameGui
• [_] navigator
• DragNavigator
• [_] parser
• BoardParser
• [_] view
• Cell3D
• CellColors
• Pawn
• View

[_] FOLDER

CLASS

Finally, I coded an AI, trying to keep it very simple and CPU-light. I will explain the algorithm in a future article, but you can see now that it is very fast (so fast that I must slow-down the run in order to keep the "AI vs AI" game comprehensible).

I hope you enjoyed the game !