Welcome to the first dev log for Stones and Rivers Digital.

Intent: This is a digital version of the Stones and Rivers board game. I wanted to provide a way for folks to be able to play my game without needing a physical copy so you can share the cozy joy of it with friends and family. 

What was worked on:

This is the first public release of the Stones and Rivers Digital game and this includes basic local multiplayer, basic sounds and effects.

Settings, How to play, and Game screens with transitions

Technologies: 

This is built in the Godot 4 engine. The biggest reason for this is to prevent issues with upgrading once Godot 4 is released and to utilize some of its networking features (in the future). 

The board itself is made up of texture buttons that are blank if they don’t have any pieces or display the piece and its face up side for stone or river. The upside of this is that there is a simple event logic that can be done for all of the rendering and the calculations of a given piece’s movement. This does mean though that the board is currently tied to the UI and is limited in its animations and couples the piece data and the visuals tightly. There are plans to modify this in the future.

The Game engine runs off of a Finite State Machine for managing the current operation the player can use and what options the player is presented with at any given moment.

The logic for finding the valid moves is based on the Depth First Search algorithm that checks for if any more rivers need to be investigated, if a move is made by a stone piece, a river piece or if the piece has already been sent. With this information, all of the potential moves are calculated and presented to the player.

Known issues/Future Features:

Lack of animations on the Flip and Win Screens

No Move history/ undo button

No visual indicator for previous movement

No Color blind mode

No Networking

How to play sections are minimal

Only English language