Settlers of Catan (GBA)
This was a very simple Game Boy Advance game based off of the popular board game Settlers of Catan. Settlers is a pretty simple game; if you want to know the rules, you can just interweb search for them.
I developed this along with a friend, Andy Matange, for my senior honors thesis while I was an undergrad at NCSU. The idea behind the thesis was to investigate "Hardware-limited Artificial Intelligence". I focused on the game’s implementation, while Andy focused on the AI. We both contributed to the design and the research paper.
We made a few key changes to make the implementation, interface, and AI a little easier. Specifically, we got rid of the port tiles, inter-player trading, and the theif. Our version was so handicapped that it could hardly even be considered a game, but it was still a good platform for learning about how to create in AI.
Because of this class I was able to avoid doing a senior design class where the rest of the CSC students had to spend 75% of their semester writing and reviewing requirements documents from some corporate sponsor. Additionally, it enabled me to graduate with honors. Getting to make a video game instead of having to do a corporate sponsored senior design project was a pretty awesome trade-off. As a little extra gravy, I also presented the game in the NCSU Game Developer’s Club’s first game development contest.
