Following on from my blog about Nautical Crosses and using simple game AI to make decisions, I thought I’d go a few steps further and include an different game that not only uses much more advanced decision-making techniques, but also uses code-driven animation to simulate a traditional board game.

The game is based on one I can remember having on my Nokia phone many years ago called Bantumi. At a time when we were churning out idea for London-themed games this one called ‘Londinium’ came about – it’s Britons v Romans in a traditional-looking board game set up. You take the role of the Britons (unless you choose to play a friend in 2-player mode) and you choose a piece to move anti-clockwise round the board with the aim of landing on and capturing your Roman enemy. The piece can move by the number of points indicated in the square where it’s standing, and as you move round one point is left on each square you touch. Capture an enemy character and you win the points from that square. I suggest you try it and work it out for yourself – it’s not as difficult to play as I make it sound, and it can quickly become addictive.

The software uses weighting to decide the Romans’ movements (as with Nautical Crosses) and there’s a definite aggression about the Roman tactics. If a Roman can safely take a Briton’s piece then it will, otherwise it’ll look for either a defensive move or will look a few moves ahead to see it can trap a Briton – bear in mind that if one of your pieces is blocking a final landing square ahead then you won’t be able to move out of the way and will face capture.  You can win back captured pieces for every 10 points you achieve.

This game was never finished to a commercial level so there may be a few ‘rough’ edges. A former colleague of mine, Dan Dawson, created the graphics for the game. There’s a lot more than decision making on show here of course, including using code to animate objects as well as scaling objects in a pseudo-3D world. For those familiar with Director, I should point out that all the game play happens in one frame on the score and is included in a single frame script, other than some simple animation code to scroll through text which sits in behaviours on text sprites.Originally the game was made for use with a keyboard and used arrow keys and ENTER to scroll round the board. I have, however, just updated the code to accept mouse clicks; so if you prefer you can just click on the piece that you want to move.

For commercial reasons, the source code isn’t available but I hope playing the game demonstrates the principles enough to make this article worthwhile.