How to Develop an iPad Board Game App: Part 2/2

[rwenderlich]

This is the official thread to discuss the following blog post: How to Develop an iPad Board Game App: Part 2/2

[avi8tor]

Great tutorial and I may have an idea for an app based on this with some variations. My question is one of patents and copyrights. If I make a game with the Reversi logic am I not setting myself up for a lawsuit for patent violation?

[zeiteisen]

Thats a nice tutorial. I like that you encourage unit testing.
The AI part is nice too. To copy the board is much better than my past approach to write a undo function.

[ColinEberhardt]

Great tutorial and I may have an idea for an app based on this with some variations. My question is one of patents and copyrights. If I make a game with the Reversi logic am I not setting myself up for a lawsuit for patent violation?

Well, I'm not going to come after you with my lawyers

Although, I am guessing that you are referring to Pressman Toy Crop who market the game under the name Othello.

As long as you steer clear of registered trademarks, I very much doubt you would ever have any legal issues with publishing a Reversi game. From searching the internet, it would appear that it was patented in 1888 - this patent would have lapsed long ago.

Colin E.

[zeiteisen]

We made Reverse It and had never legel issues.

[kurpaige]

Thank you for this tutorial. I actually understand most of it, I would never have been able to code it from scratch. any hint on how to set a difficulty?

[tflawlis]

Most ALL the tutorials on this site are great. This one, though, illustrates strategic coding techniques that I would have expected not to be publicly shared due to the value. For example, your use of blocks implementing the "navigation" function is a great application for this tool.

Your encouragement for the use of unit testing is, embarrassingly, a topic I've never even taken an interest... but no more.

Much appreciation for the sharing of some great application development strategies.

[ColinEberhardt]

Thank you for this tutorial. I actually understand most of it, I would never have been able to code it from scratch. any hint on how to set a difficulty?

Glad you liked it! Computer players often have their difficulty set by one of two methods, either:

1) The depth to which they can search the game tree is limited. i.e. an 'easy' player would perform a tree search to a depth of 2, 'medium' to 4 and 'hard' to '6'

or

2) The amount of time the computer player has to analyse moves is limited, i.e. an 'easy' player might be allowed to analyse moves for 0.5 seconds, 'medium' for 2 seconds and 'hard' for 10 seconds.

The timed version, while a little harder to write, is probably the best. If you just limit by depth, moves at the start and end of the game, where the game tree is small, will be made quite rapidly. However, in the middle of the game the computer player will be quite slow because there are a great many moves to analyse.

Hope that helps, Colin E.

[ColinEberhardt]

Most ALL the tutorials on this site are great. This one, though, illustrates strategic coding techniques that I would have expected not to be publicly shared due to the value. For example, your use of blocks implementing the "navigation" function is a great application for this tool

Wow - great praise! glad you liked it, and thanks for your comments.

Colin E.

[rcritz]

In the copy of the tutorial posted on the site (I haven't looked at your completed code or repo), it seems to me there is an extraneous _ in scoreForBoard:depth: in SHCComputerOpponent.m. At the point where you clone a board to create testBoard, you are cloning the current live board each time. Unless I haven't yet had enough coffee this morning to parse this out, that would fix it so that the search doesn't actually play out several moves forward the way it should. I think the line should read:

Code: Select all

SHCReversiBoard *testBoard = [board copyWithZone:nil]; // no underscore here!

Thanks for a great look at a cool game design with some interesting techniques thrown in for good measure!