Another Flashy Project

When I started my university course almost three years ago now, I vowed to my friend that I would one day learn how to make a game so that we could play over a long distance. She resides in London during term time and we greatly miss our gaming sessions. The game in question is the British version of Blackjack which is more akin to UNO then 21 / pontoon. The game isn't widely known and there are so many variants of the rules that finding an existing game is very unlikely.

Last night however, I remembered once again that promise and started drafting some code. The logical choice was to make it in Flash now that I have some experience of using it from my dissertation and I quickly wrote down code for most of the rules. Card games are a really good starting point for these simple games because they have clearly defined rules and very simple graphics. I found a website with the card graphics on them and have now finished most of the code. I even used proper classes to define the player and card objects but was a little disappointed to discover the lack of an enumeration type in Actionscript which is perfect for things like suits.

The next stage is to introduce the multiplayer element to it which will be the most difficult part. I have no knowledge of the communication interfaces that flash uses for this sort of thing but I think I've found a couple of libraries that are free to use and will enable multiplayer features like rooms and chat. Who knows, maybe this could take off and become really popular. I might end up making some money from it if I get round to finishing it!

This week's single of the week comes from an unlikely source. She has already featured as the artist of a previous single of the week but I was of the opinion back then that this was her only decent song and I decided not to buy the album. This week however, Radio 1 have been playing her new single The Writer and I fell in love with it from the first few notes. I have since bought the album and have been listening to this song rather a lot so it very much deserves to be this week's single.