Stronghold

Three players with their starting castles

Stronghold is a fast paced, turn based, castle building game. Inspired from the classic game Rampart, players and AI's must build walls, place cannons and bring down enemies castles.

Game play takes place in three repeating stages. In the build phase players must place random Tetris like wall pieces onto their territory trying to enclose as many tiles as they can before the timer runs out. Players must have at least one keep enclosed by walls other wise they are defeated. If they do survive they receive gold based on how much land they destroyed and how many walls they destroyed in the previous round.

AI made castle (excluding green) enclosing multiple keeps

In the cannon phase players pay gold to place three types of cannons; the standard cannon is cheap and effective, the multi-cannon shoots multiple miniature cannon balls that can pepper a castle's walls, and the mega cannon that lobs a giant cannonball across the map that can destroy wipe out many wall pieces at once.

In the attack phase players use their cannons to assault the walls of the other players' castles. Players must use their cursor to select which wall piece they want their cannons to destroy. They must destroy as many as much of their enemies' castles before the timer runs out. Each player participate in each round simultaneously which will repeat until only one player remains and is declared the victor or until a round count is reached and then the player with the highest score wins.

Blue losing to yellow after not enclosing any keeps

This fun action filled game forces players to think quickly on their feet trying to fit a certain wall piece to finish their castles and react quickly to combat other players. Each map has a randomly generated map allowing for new unpredictable maps able to support 2-8 players. AI have four levels of difficulty allowing for the player to have a fun easy match or a tough challenge.

Eight player free for all in the attack phase

Team:
Jesse Harrison: Architecture/Graphics programmer
Aaron McDaniel: UI and Gameplay programmer
William Jacobs: Physics and AI programmer

My Contributions:

Implemented the collision resolution and physics (C++)
Created the random map generator (C++)
Made the enemy AI using finite state machines and planning (C++)
Worked on some of the game play (C++)

Available Summer of 2013