A work in progress: Card game platform

I'm working on a new personal project. It will be a card game platform.

Basically, this is an easily extendable project that doesn't do anything until extended.

One extends it by coding the gameplay. Everything else, or almost everything else, is all done. You want to make a card game, you no longer have to worry about anything except rules and gameplay, etc.

Currently, these things (and more) are to be done because all card games share them, or at least some of them:

• Cards, decks, dealing, shuffling, etc;
• individual score, team score, teams or no teams, etc;
  draw pile (deck), face-up pile, discard pile, trick pile, users' hands and who sees them, users' face down cards and face up cards on the field, etc;
• hand's active/inactive cards (based on whether or not they can be played this turn, or however their functionality is extended), selected cards for playing;
• the pot, the individual $ amount (score), the rotation of bet/bidding;
• and lastly any special user 'marks' such as the dealer chip

Almost as importantly, or maybe more so, the structure itself will be coded, so there's no need for that.

The structure would be such that it can be slightly modified to suit other types of card games. That's not my problem.




Why this post?
First, I'm looking for feedback. Good/bad idea. Advice. Etc.
Second, I'm going to post updates here with some code and my process and problems I faced. Maybe it will help someone. It will most likely help me if people actually care and respond. The updates will probably also contain attachments of working code and the driver classes to test it. This is me revealing my thought process and opening it up for review.


The language will be java. Comments and the simplicity of the language will make the code readable to almost anyone.

If you plan to set it up for online multi-player, I'll be watching with interest.

If you're thinking windows, there's a dll you can use that already has some of that. It think it might be cards.dll.

I would just like to say that this is a really good idea, gimp. Especially if you do make it networkable, like sizablegrin mentioned.

I wrote a card game a few months ago and I was trying to find some framework-type code to handle those common tasks and I had no luck (well, no luck finding something *good*).

Best of luck. I'll be watching with interest as well.

Networking is something I'd like to add. Partly for the reason that I made a multiplayer game before that worked but was very, very dirtily coded. I'd like to learn how to do it correctly with a relaxed schedule.

I think I should make the basics first, and not worry about networking until all features I want to implement are implemented. What do you think? I know I should keep future networking in mind, but should I design specifically for it? Or design immediately with it?

Thanks, but I'm using java. This needs to be cross-platform. Plus, I want to do my own work.

Excellent Idea. I remember doing a card class in HS, we had to make it shuffle. You would not believe how much of a pain in the arse it seemed. Good Luck

I'd have a look at the networking side now, just a read up on the different technologies you might use. It could prove a major pita later on when you find the system you'd like to use but find you have to rewrite how things work.

I'll look into it. Thanks!

You need to at least consider networking in the beginning. If you have a server that hosts multiplayer games, the majority of the software is on the server. That increases the load on the server and the infrastructure. If you decide that one of the multiple players will be a 'host', then the players dowload enough of the code to be able to handle (some of) the hosting duties on the client.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each approach.

I think that there's going to be a central server, but that server can be on one of the players' computers. The creator turns it on to host a game, but they can also send a copy to someone else for them to host.