Turf!

Turf! is a mobile game of real-world real-time strategy. Players race around, planting digital pylons -- pylons that stake claims on turf. The team with that maintained the most turf throughout the game time is the winner.

This game is a challenge I set for myself to create a digital game that encourages both teamwork and physical movement.

It has come with some really interesting game design and technical challenges, including:

1. Keeping track of players. Okay, so let’s learn the iOS Core Location service, and possibly the Google equivalent. I did look into MapBox, and it looks great, but I couldn’t get it to work with any tech stack.
2. Keeping track of state, with multiplayer replication. For this, I thought I would give Firebase Realtime Database a go. I’ve never worked with JSON-style or NoSQL databases before, so there’s a thing. But I was intrigued by the potential for pseudo-realtime networking.
3. I didn’t want to force players to define territory with outlines – that seemed like too much busywork. So I went with a single marker placement at a location. That meant defining the territory programmatically. My instinct was to use Voronoi Diagramming, which I think turned out pretty well.
4. Lastly, I wanted the territory to be dynamic throughout the game – so that markers would “expire”, and give up their territory. This also meant that the score couldn’t be based only upon territory, but rather a territory per timescale value (currently per second).

This game is still in progress. If you're interested in testing it, please get in touch.