Many years ago, I've come across this wonderful game called Filler. Originally created by Dmitry Pashkov in 1990 and later published as 7 colors. With the advent of smart phones I was disappointed that no good version of the game was available for Windows Phone. Being a .net developer who was into Microsoft tech I expanded on the original idea and created Annexation.
The rules of the game are simple. Players start in the corners of a board and take turns expanding their territory by choosing a color and annexing all cells of the chosen color, that are adjacent to their territory.
In this way the players slowly take over the board. The player with more annexed cells wins.
A couple of years ago I decided to create a new version of Annexation for other platforms. With this in mind I decided to create the game as a web application and use Capacitor to create web native apps. The technology stack:
- core game features are written in javascript
- board graphs and visualizations are created using Voronoi tessellation
- game loop and presentation is built on Phaser game framework
- native apps are built using Capacitor (and associated tools)
- ai players use MCTS algorithm with random playouts running on GPU using WebGL
In future blog posts I will try to go into more details about individual components and perhaps provide you with useful information on how to use the technologies mentioned.
This new version of Annexation is currently in a playable state and the first version should be released soon on Android. I'll go over the current features of the game and road-map ideas in following posts.