Forum ‹ Showroom ‹ Connect 4

[szuranski]

I play Connect 4 with my son and thought it would be cool if I could make an online version that he could play with his friends and cousins. I have done a few small Flash projects and wanted to learn more and thought this would be an ideal project. Long story short after some research I finally ended up at PlayerIO.

There is a lot to learn to create a multiplayer game but the PlayerIO API and documentation is great and makes it much easier. The free service is great for development until you get your game popular.

Now I just need to come up with an original game. Here's the link to the game. Click the "Play now" image to start the game.

http://www.szworld.net/c4/main.htm

[Dg74]

Very Impressive!
You have taken a classic game and made it feel new and fresh!

[cjcenizal]

Wow, this is really awesome. Great work!!! I think you can easily make this into an original game.... add some new graphics (e.g. theme everything like jewels, or trolls, or something simple and fun), add some animations, and most importantly and lastly.... introduce some very simple additional game mechanics.

For instance, what if you could drop a time-based bomb which would destroy a neighboring game piece in a certain direction? The time based bomb could add pressure to other player.

Or, what if gameplay continued on to a score of 5 points, continuing with the same board and configuration of pieces? What if every 15 seconds the game slid all of the pieces down 1 space, so that the bottom row disappears off the screen? What if connecting 4 earns you a point and the 4 connected pieces blow up, so that any pieces resting on them either slide down to fill in the vacated space or blew up too (think Dr. Mario and Tetris)? What if each player had 10 seconds to make a move, or was forced to forfeit a point?

If you could program a simple framework to allow for mixing and matching these rules, you could create a number of connect-4 variations on the server. People could jump around trying different ones out and you'd figure out pretty quick which was the most popular.

[szuranski]

Dg74 and cjcenizal, thanks for the positive feedback. Those are some great ideas cjcenizal. The way I have coded it right now it would be hard to change but I think I'm going to go back and organize the code a little better. I come from a vb.net background and feel that you can encapsulate your objects much better with classes and other methods. I don't know how other than create separate classes in AS3 to do that. I need to learn more about what the best coding practices are for Actionscript.