Chapter 13. Tanktics

NOTE

The next 14 chapters tell the stories of the games that I have designed over the course of my career. I'll not be dragging you down memory lane with endless tedious tales of code breakages and deadline headaches. The purpose of these chapters is not to produce a history of my efforts, but to illustrate some of the more interesting design issues raised in actual practice. Much of my time during the years covered by this history was devoted to uninstructive drudgery; there's no point in burdening you with such dreck. Instead, I'll be flitting through the years, picking out interesting vignettes from the larger story. These will, I hope, fill out the skeletal theory presented in earlier chapters with flesh-and-blood examples of the messy application of the grand principles. Besides, some of the stories are fun.

In the summer of 1974, I was working on my master's thesis on visual binary stars. The thesis, "A Catalogue of Dynamical Parallaxes of Visual Binary Stars," was mostly a matter of computer programming, with judicious assessments of the occasional oddball binary star. Consequently I spent a lot of time at the university computer center. While working there one afternoon, I ran into a chap who was attempting to write a program that would play a boardgame called Blitzkrieg. It was a strategy wargame, using division-sized units maneuvering across continental-sized maps. I was skeptical of his project; it seemed to me that the task of creating algorithms for planning such movement was likely impossible. Nevertheless I was intrigued, and for the next few years mulled over the problem.

After graduating, I taught physics at a small community college in Nebraska. In my spare time, I played board wargames and continued to wonder if it might be possible to program a computer to play a wargame. The problem of programming a strategy wargame seemed too difficult, but a tactical wargame of armored combat was a simpler proposition. With tanks, there are only a few combat units, each moving and fighting separately. Each one need only establish a simple line of sight to shoot at an enemy. Terrain considerations seemed simple enough. As I mused about the problem, I broke it down into sub-problems, writing down my rough approach to each. In this way, I convinced myself that the overall problem could in fact be solved.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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