2010-02-11
Call of Cthulhu
The other day I was downtown perusing the local board game store and I asked the fellow there what he recommended. He pointed out a very interesting gem of a game to me known as Arkham Horror. He warned me that the rules were a bit complex but once you get over the steep learning curve that it was actually a very enjoyable game. With that in mind I picked it up and instantly fell in love with it. That being said, I have always wanted to take a board game and do a little bit more with it. That started the adventure that currently has taken up the role of “my side project”.
As part of my work with AppScale, I’ve become very familiar with Google App Engine, so I figured I’d throw together a Google App Engine app that allows users to upload their game data from Arkham Horror (that is, if they won the game and various things relating to this) and have it synthesize the data. I also wanted it to be able to predict the odds of winning a game given this data and all the usual fun things that go along with that. After a week or so of infrequent programming, I’m proud to put out a very rough version of my Call of Cthulhu application! It doesn’t do the predictive stuff yet but does do the following right now (it’s fairly minimal but I’ve only been working at it for a week so far):
- Allows users to upload their data and view it later
- Allows users to view global user data
- Gives stats on games played and which Great Old One the player is most effective against
I also gave a talk on how I developed it and the APIs that were available to me (as well as a little bit of cloud computing stuff) to the Senior Capstone class at UCSB. Here’s the slides on that as well. Enjoy!
