Caribbean Games - Intro

Fun under the sun


At GamePyong, we enjoy games of all shapes and sizes. As a Trinidadian game development studio, one of GamePyong's major objectives is to highlight the indigenous culture of not only Trinidad, but the wider region at large. We aim to do this in the only way we know how: by making games!
In this series of posts, we will be diving into some of the local and regional games played by Caribbean people; from All Fours in Trinidad to Dandy Shandy in Jamaica. We will use these games as inspiration for building playable digital counterparts using HTML5 technology. Some games won't be exact replicas; creative leeway will be exercised where necessary to create a compelling experience.

The games will be built in HTML5 and Javascript using the Phaser game framework. This will allow for maximum cross-platform portability. You will be able to play on your desktop/laptop browser as well as on your smart phone. If time permits, we will attempt to build and upload the games to the Android and iOS app stores too.

 Each post will offer a glimpse under the hood of the making of the game. The game design techniques used will be outlined and we'll go into all the juicy technical details. And of course, we'll include a link to the game for you to play right on your desktop or mobile browser!

 Building two games per week and posting about them is a bit of a challenge given time constraints, so we'll try to aim for at least one game per week and maybe a tutorial on game development or some other game-related post. Feel free to suggest your favourite local games in the comments section below and we'll try to build them!

 Stay tuned for more!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Multiplayer Games using Google Sheets

Image
Google Sheets For Multiplayer Prototyping The most essential part of a multiplayer game is the ability for players to communicate with each other in some way. The simplest way to achieve this is for players to have shared access to a database that they both can read from and write to. When building multiplayer prototypes, it can be a hassle to setup a server and database and to then manage connections between players. What if there was a free database that existed somewhere and which players could perform operations on? Well, a database can simply be a table consisting of columns and rows; exactly the same as a spreadsheet. Google Sheets is a popular free online spreadsheet application which can be read from and written to via APIs. The idea here is to use Google Sheets as our backend database for our multiplayer game prototypes. In order to do this, we need to be able to read and write to the sheets via Javascript. To read from the sheet, we can use a library called She
Read more

Caribbean Games - Part 1: All Fours

Image
Caribbean Games is a series that is focused on highlighting games indigenous to the islands of the Caribbean. GamePyong will explore various local and regional games and pastimes, derive inspiration from them and create games based on them. A Game of Trump For a Trinidadian game developer talking about games native to the Caribbean, we would be remiss if we didn't kick things off with the most popular card game in Trinidad and Tobago: All Fours! All Fours is a trick-taking card game which originated in England in the 17th century and has since spawned numerous other card games including Pitch and Pedro. In Trinidad, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who hasn't heard of the game. The rules of All Fours are fairly simple. It's a four-player card game consisting of two teams. The goal of the game is to get more points than the other team by winning tricks with the most valuable cards. Points are also awarded for holding the highest and lowest trump and for h
Read more

Caribbean Games - Part 2: Pitch

Image
Caribbean Games is a  series  that is focused on highlighting games indigenous to the islands of the Caribbean.  GamePyong  will explore various local and regional games and pastimes, derive inspiration from them and create games based on them. Knuckle Down and Get Rolling Play the game we built for this blog post here: Play Pitch Playing with marbles is one of the oldest and most pervasive games in the world. Made of clay, stone, ceramic or glass, marbles are small spheres about half an inch in diameter; though some like the 'Big-Goonks' are a bit larger. Modern marbles usually contain a swirl of coloured glass inside. In Trinidad, the most coveted marbles were usually crystals (coloured glass with nothing inside), 'K-K' (opaque white marbles with coloured designs), 'Snake Eyes' (marbles that contained 2 or 3 dark swirls) and the aforementioned 'Big-Goonks' (larger and heavier than regular marbles). There are many different games that
Read more