Saturday, January 01, 2005

Programming: Riskier (Part 1)

I love the board game of Risk, and have played various RTS (Real Time Strategy) games for several years. At high school I was always building games (via D&D or Battlemech) to keep myself and friends amused. Naturally, as a programmer, I have always thought about writing a game, since building business data-centric applications, although challenging, is by no means interesting, and to most, out right esoteric.

I chose Risk because the game is in essence extremely simple, and hence a great candidate for implementation to a computer. Furthermore, the Risk concept is easily extensible, with various additions to the core game being possible, particularly as future add ons.

So, what is Risk? Well, to the uninitiated (if there is such a person!) Risk is a game of nation building, or empire building. The game is won by conquering the neighbouring regions, and ensuring that your competitors can’t do the same. The winner is, by the classic definition, the last man standing. The value of a particular region is it’s composition in the continent. When all regions within a continent are conquered, the player then receives extra spending points. Armies are generated via these spending points, and thus the game is born.

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