Programming hexagonal game board

A lot of what is hard about writing a game is getting the design right. What makes a game fun? Game design is an art, not a science. I love tile grid based games because tiles can produce a lot of complexity from simple parts []. There are several topics that come up with tile based games. The data structures are typically variants of 2 dimensional arrays. The display transforms an array of tile data into top-down 2D , isometric 2.

The algorithms on grids allow you to implement gameplay elements ranging from line of sight to evaluating where enemies are likely to be. Tiles also work well with procedural world building algorithms, such as the ones in Diablo, Civilization, and Dwarf Fortress. The basic tile structures do not depend on whether your display is 2D, 2.

These articles are about how to store your data. A 2D tile grid can be displayed in various ways. Viewed at a single point in time, generated game maps are rarely as nice as hand-crafted worlds. However, they have three advantages: 1 lower cost per world if there are many worlds to be made, 2 more replay value because the next time through the world is different, and 3 potential for the world evolving while the game progresses.

Many war games use hexagonal grids instead of square grids. Squares share an edge with four neighbors but also touch another four neighbors at just one point. This often complicates movement along grids because diagonal movements are hard to weight properly with integer movement values. You either have four directions or eight directions with squares, but with hexagons, you have a compromise—six directions.

I have found object oriented programming to be useful for user interfaces, operating systems, and games.

Since most of my readers are familiar with object oriented programming, the links I collect here are mostly about alternatives to the usual approaches. There is no one best approach. Learn many. Adventure games often have good puzzle and story structures.

TADS [] was the tool to use, or maybe Inform []. Check out the Interactive Fiction Wiki [] for more. However some things fall in between and are hard to express purely as data. Active Oldest Votes.

Improve this answer. Michael Kristofik. The Overflow Blog. Stack Gives Back Safety in numbers: crowdsourcing data on nefarious IP addresses. Featured on Meta. New post summary designs on greatest hits now, everywhere else eventually. Related 1. Introduction The goal of my project is to create a modular, reusable hexagon based map that could be used in simple games and ALife applications. Hexagon Hexagon based games, whether traditional board games or computer-based, provide more strategic and tactical game-play when compared to simple square based games like the Checkers game board.

PointF[] points; private float side; private float h; private float r; private Hexagonal. HexOrientation orientation; private float x; private float y; For example, a board with Flat orientation would map to a two dimensional array like this: The most important method in the Board class is Initialize , which is private and called from the constructor. Hex[,] hexes; private int width; private int height; private int xOffset; private int yOffset; private int side; private float pixelWidth; private float pixelHeight; private Hexagonal.

HexOrientation orientation; Points[ int Hexagonal. ToInt32 System. Ceiling board. BackgroundColor ; bitmapGraphics. FillPolygon new SolidBrush board. BackgroundColor , board. Hexes[i, j]. GridColor; p. DrawPolygon p, board. ActiveHexBorderColor; p. ActiveHexBorderWidth; bitmapGraphics. DrawImage bitmap, new Point this. Dispose ; bitmap. Pulling it all together in a Form To make this all work, you need to create a Form with a GraphicsEngine object and a Board object.

Draw e. X - graphicsEngine. BoardXOffset, e. Y - graphicsEngine. Min p1. Max p1. X; if p1. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Leave a Reply Cancel reply Enter your comment here