A Game of Ur

Process

Watching the linked video above I found myself formulating how the board could be described as an array of positions and how it would be simple to move each piece to the positions based on the ‘dice’ results, when Irving Finkel expressed the wish for the game to be more popular I quickly prototyped my method of making the game in Unity that night. Playing the game with my wife proved to be quite fun so I continued development till I had full working version. The speed at which this was coming together inspired me to make it my first commercial release so I learnt all the steps required to add in game advertisements and purchases to remove said ads, setting up an android publisher account and getting the game on the app store. I also set myself the target of releasing it that year, which I accomplished, in the end total development took 3 months of part time work.

Post Mortem

I’m proud of this game as its my first completed but see many glaring issues with it, from the simplicity, basic graphics and the later added tutorial on first launch.

If I was to revisit this I would like to really push the idea of it being a fast, simple version of the original game with a lot more ‘juice’ in the interactions to really drive home the more casual nature of this form of the board game.

My biggest programming take away was the lack of fundamental design patterns, a lot of the bugs and issues I encountered creating this game would not have even existed if I’d used Observer Method, as it exists the code is currently very entangled.