After not working on Condado, my Android port of San Juan, over the summer; I started working on it this month. The game itself is almost feature complete, or at least as much as I want to add to it. The two missing things are: 1) Multiplayer support, and 2) The Events expansion.

Multiplayer is an interesting issue. I don’t want to maintain a server so there isn’t true online multiplayer. Instead, I’m taking a hotseat approach, where there is one device that you pass around to the various players on their turns. It sounds straightforward but in real game play, there is actually a lot of swapping that occurs. Whenever a player picks a role, each player has to act on the role, and sometimes there are buildings that cause the active player to switch for a short period. So while multiplayer “works” I don’t think it’s ideal. I guess it’s a tradeoff; you can have the game in a handheld device and suffer through some usability quirks, or you can carry around the physical cards and boards!

The Events expansion is a bit different than the original and the first (“New Buildings”) expansion. Instead of new err… buildings, there are err… Events. This means that my game engine had to be changed to handle this new type of card in addition to implementing the behaviour. Not an insurmountable task but it didn’t feel as straightforward or easy so I had put if off for awhile.

With those two major features, I’m pretty much done with Condado (and it should hit v1.0.0 finally). I’m kind of on the fence as to whether I want to work on another card/board game, improve my other apps, or just take a break from Android development for awhile.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, condado