Casino Deluxe

[Rezek]

Wow, I bet this sure is an original idea.

A quick search of the ticalc.org BASIC 83+ Archive reveals 64 occurences of the word 'Casino' in it, 71 of 'BlackJack' (including 'Black Jack'), and God only knows how many of slots, and... God forbid... Tic-Tac-Toe !
Guess how many instances of Casino appear in the Assembly Section?

1.

Now I'm not going to start anyother arguement about BASIC and ASM, because I think BASIC is great too*, but honestly, we need more assembly casino games! The assembly one contains an overworld () and 3 () games. Excellent but not long lasting other than for blackjack.

Before I get into the gory guts of my idea, let me explain that this is very much still in the planning stage and open to all suggestions. Right now, (as all my programs begin), it is a mesh of ideas that keep popping up and hitting eachother and spawning new ideas and code segments in my head. A brief announcements about my other projects, then we'll begin: Assembly Wizard is on hiatus but still being worked on slowly but surely (about 3 lines of code a week ). Dragon Tears was set back 50% when I had to reformat my comp and forgot to back it up ). But I'm still working on both, just letting you all know.

Ok, the game: Currently plans are for Ion TI-83 & TI-83+ assembly, with save / load games ('persons'), betting, ai, link support and more. Several games are going to be included, and not all will be card games. I have a pretty good idea for a routine for creating & shuffling a deck, each card will be a binary number like so: 00 00 0000, whith the first two 0's representing a suit (0-3), and then two 0's, followed by four 0's representing the card (1-13). Shuffling is easy, select two random cards and switch them over and over again. I could even do it as an interupt.

Drawing cards would be done via a pointer to the next card in sequence, say in word 'card_draw_ptr'. Then a quick 'ld hl, (card_draw_ptr) / ld a (hl) / inc hl / ld (card_draw_ptr), hl' would put in the acc. a card and move the pointer to the next one. I imagine a decompress routine for the card could't be very difficult.

Each person would begin the game with the choice 'create Character'. They would then fill in some info about him, such as sex, age, name, ect, creating a 'Virtual Person'. They start with money and can play different games, betting in a chance to earn more money. You could have several characters, and the game title screen (after the splash of course ) would have a choice to create new character or play an existing one. After choosing a game to play, they would then get choices to play an AI, a fellow person (on one calc, passing it around), or via link against another charcter. A cheat protection could be done quite easily, simply keep a record of the last three people you have played with that character and prevent them from playing someone with the same name twice (the entire calc, that is).

This led me to think about expanding the game, making it more RPG like (overworld), like the other assembly game), but then I decided that this wouold take away the main focus, which is supposed to be the card games, so I decided to add a 'non-betting' mode in which one could play a game of say blackjack just for fun, and also have it not just card games. This is the list of games currently being implemented (that is, planned on):

BlackJack
Craps
Slots
Poker - Might be difficult. (that is, a challenge)
Games that I would like to include: (a star denotes how hard it would be, see poker)

Hearts** - I'd really like this!
Spades** - Once the engine for hearts is done, this would be easy.
Solitaire***
Freecell* - Make everything have to be done manually

Anybody got any other card or gambling games they would like to include, or ideas in general? Let me know via PM or here.


*Any of Kevin Oulett's games should end that argument quickly.

[0oruneo0]

Sounds cool.

Roulette? That's always fun. If you do make poker, what type are you plannign to make? Hold-em style or video poker style?

[Rezek]

as many as i can cram in. prob NOT texas hold em, somethign simple. Oh yes, and if you can find me a link to some more info i'll prob. include roulette. (not russion i presume)

[leofox]

roulette could be cool, especially if you could make some animation of the ball rolling in the roullete thing. But oruneo already said that...

[aforsy]

you could maybe somehow make all the individual games like plug-ins or something, that way people could include only the games they like.

the person's character would walk around in the casino that had "outlets" or something for each game, but could only actually play the ones they had loaded on their calc.

[Rezek]

Now that's a nice idea- only the end-user may not want ten programs cluttering up his calc- perhaps, have the casino game written like a shell, but instead of having the programs on his calc stay there, he merely puts them on his calc, goes to the main program, and chooses to 'install' them from there, and then he can delete the 'installer' programs- the main programs filesize would shrink or grow as needed. Of course, that creates difficulties with labels and such in the assembly program- hmm...

[MissingIntellect]

[Rezek]

The idea is still that some users (for aesthetic reasons) might not want to have 10 seperate files on there program... although appvars would work better. Perhaps I could write a bit like a 'Casino Shell' for want of a better word, with routines and stuff built in like ion, and so on? Hmm.... *thinks some more*

Oh, for the rest of you, I have super cool awesome screenshots just testing the routines. ATM, I haven't bothered to put any up, maybe later?

[DarkerLine]

If they appvars were hidden and archived, the users wouldn't even know they're there (apart from them taking up memory, of course). Of course, then they decide to share the program via link port and can't send the appvars... so maybe they shouldn't be hidden after all. Or maybe that option could be turned on and off by the game.

[Rezek]

Thus making it more shell-like... all in all this should prove to be an excellent coding opportunity for me. Another option is to hide the appvars, and then have the user choose 'Send Game' from the main program and the program would then send the data to the other calc.

Occam's razor cuts that to ribbons.