Skippy! - A FreeBASIC Card Game!

subxero · Posted: Jul 26, 2007 15:02 Post subject: Skippy! - A FreeBASIC Card Game!

A while back I became completely addicted to the card game Skip-bo, but after my girlfriend and I broke up I had nobody to play it with. I forgot about the game, and recently picked it up again and decided to write a computer version of it. So I did.

Here's the project homepage: http://subxero.phatcode.net/projects/skippy
The source is available; it's fairly clean, except for my crappy user interface code.

There is a known problem that I haven't gotten around to fixing. The cards animate at veeery different speeds depending on CPU/GPU power. They work great on my PC, but very slow on my parents' PC, and too fast on my friend's Core 2 Duo. I've been lazy and haven't fixed it. If someone feels like fixing it, let me know and post the patch somewhere.

(The playing instructions are in the readme file, for those who have not played this game before.)

Let me know what you think!

Lachie Dazdarian · Master

Fun game. I lost, though. Had 7 cards left. Very nice graphical design. No complaints there.

I must admit, I took me some 5 minutes to grasp to concept. It's probably me, and not the documentation.

The game run with ok speed on my PC. Perhaps the cards were moving somewhat too slow in some situations.

For FPS control, you might wanna check this thread:

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8878&highlight=

Can I add this game to http://games.freebasic.net ? Did you complete any other FB games?

Mlok · Posted: Jul 27, 2007 0:14 Post subject:

Wow, gooood one. I like the GUI and Design in general too.. Only the card movement should be a bit more dynamic, I think.
..I won my first game :)

rdc · Master

Very nice game. Well done.

shwS · Posted: Jul 27, 2007 10:44 Post subject:

Ah, I LOVE this skip-bo! I'll try your game out in a sec and tell you what I think :)

edit: well, I must say, really well done, smooth on my computer. I won, and I'm surely gonna play again. Great game, well done :)
A nice feature would be if you could decide how hard it was, for those who've played skip-bo before this is pretty easy, it's be great if there was a "hard" level too.

ciw1973 · Posted: Jul 27, 2007 14:23 Post subject:

Not had chance to play the game yet, but the presentation is superb. Nice work.

Z!re · Guest

[Content removed at author's request]

subxero · Posted: Jul 28, 2007 17:15 Post subject:

Thanks for your comments. You have greatly pleased me!

Also, I don't know how much work I'll do on this game anymore -- it's to a completely playable state, so if someone else would like to add features, and they work well and maintain the level of quality I tried to put into the game myself, then I'd be happy to update my copy of the game with those changes, and modify the project's web page accordingly.

Namely, I would like network play, but I've never done any network programming at all, so it'd be pretty difficult to implement for me, unless someone has some pointers on how to begin.

Lachie, I would be honored if you'd add it to games.freebasic.net -- let me know if you need anything else. (Sadly, this is my only completed FreeBASIC game. I'm currently working on a Super Mario Bros. clone, though, which is proving a difficult task.)

Also, Z!re, the animate_card routine has its own do:loop construct, completely independent of the main loop, so any kind of framerate regulation would have to be applied to all loops -- I know, it's a crappy way of doing it, but it works.

Thanks again for your comments.

SotSvart · Posted: Jul 28, 2007 18:37 Post subject:

Great game! =) Looks and plays very professionally. The only thing I'm missing is a button opening a window showing the game rules(yes I know I can read the rules in the readme, but nobody reads the readme.txt =) )

The only thing I dident like about the game was that the computer beat me..

Lachie Dazdarian · Master

Ok, then. Sadly, an FBGD update will have to wait for some two weeks since I'm busy with two other things right now (with deadlines) and the next update of FBGD so far doesn't feature anything noteworthy. Well, Skippy adds something to quality, but not enough for me to sacrifice other stuff only to update FBGD.

Dr_D · Hero

Very nice game. Looks pro. :)

SSC · Sr. Member

Very nice, although I also think there should be a difficulty detting, I played 5 games and won all 5, even the one I used to learn the game =)

also I may have come across a bug, I'm not certain cause I could not reproduce it but at one point the cards it was giving me were ALL sequential, thus making it very easy to win heh.

Pritchard · Guru

^.^;; I made the game crash by having a pile too big! :D

subxero · Posted: Jul 29, 2007 4:16 Post subject:

@Pritchard -- yeah, I completely forgot to handle that situation! The save piles hold a maximum of 24 cards -- I didn't figure anyone would hit it, but when I did, I realized I needed to handle the problem. I didn't want to increase the maximum ('cause of the limited screen space) but I never got around to actually doing the error handling.

It'd be easy using the show_message routine. Adding it somewhere in player_handle (which handles card dragging and dropping) would fix the bug. I'll look into it.

Thanks again, guys (and girl...) :-)

Conexion · Posted: Aug 10, 2007 21:05 Post subject:

Awesome stuff. Love SkipBo and this is a great rendition. I agree with the comments of multiple difficulty levels. Great graphics work (I particularly like the colour scheme) and it feels nice.

Occasionally I have a hard time dropping a card onto another card (but maybe that is me being retarded :P )

What image format did you use for this? PNG with transparency? Regardless, it looks great. Keep it up :)

edit: I was looking at the source code, and when I went to compile it, it says:
C:\Program Files\FreeBasic\fbc -s console "skippy.bi"
error 74: Invalid command-line option, "skippy.bi"

Is there a folder I have to compile this in, or what am I doing wrong?

-- sorry if that sounds completely n00bish . . . I'm still very much a n00b here - -