Though it’s been a while, I think the time has come to revisit one of my previous tutorials: the Mahjong game. For those of you that haven’t read it, the Mahjong tutorial went throughthe stages of creating a very basic Mahjong game: the graphics, the layouts, the boards and all the rest. Since I published this series of tutorials, I’ve been asked about various of features such as hint and shuffle, and have decided that it’s about time for me to add them… so here goes 
Archive for the ‘Games’ Category
Mahjong Game – Adding Features
Thursday, May 20th, 2010
Mahjong Game – The End
Sunday, November 15th, 2009Over the course of the previous posts, we’ve built and set up the entire infrastructure for our mahjong game. All that is left now is to create the actual game logic. Let’s start by going over the required functionality. What do we have in this game?
- The blocks are arranged in layers, and there can be multiple layers on a given board
- In each turn, the player must select two free, matching blocks to remove them from the board
- The game is won when there are no more blocks on the board
- The game is lost if there are still blocks on the board, but no moves are available to the player
In the previous post, we created a script tag for each block on the board, to help us to transfer the block metadata to the game client. In order to be able to read this metadata, we are going to use one of my favorite jquery plugins: (more…)
Mahjong Game – The Board
Friday, November 6th, 2009Mahjong Game – The Layout
Friday, October 9th, 2009In the previous post we created most of the graphics needed for the mahjong game. Now, it is time to create the board itself.
Since we are dealing with a lot of elements here (at least 144 objects for the tiles alone), it is better to build the layout on the server side. To do this, we will use PHP. We already know some of the code since we used it in the Memory game but we have a lot of new additions here.
- We know we only have one graphic file
- The board does not have a quadrangular (square-like) shape.
- The board is made up of several layers
Before we start, remember: today we’re only going to create the logic for the creation of the game board; we’re not going to touch the gameplay logic just yet. Let’s start by creating a layout file. (more…)
Mahjong Game – The Graphics
Sunday, October 4th, 2009The next game we’re going to build is a Mahjong solitaire game. Mahjong is a tile matching game which I feel is a natural step forward from the Memory game we created in the previous post, so if you haven’t read that post yet, you might want to give it a look.
Since this is a more complicated game, I decided it would be best to tackle it in several posts instead of just one. In this first post we’ll create the graphics needed for the game. Let’s start by considering what this game needs to include. If you search the web for even a few minutes you will find that there are several versions of this game, each with its own set of rules. To make things easier, our own basic version of the game will use simplified versions of some rules, and ignore others (like score) entirely.
So what does that leave us with? (more…)