Castle Building Game

Software	Object oriented language with good GUI tools, or a game engine.
Covers	Programming, game design, graphics.
Skills Required	Programming, interest in architecture or history or warfare.
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ??? Programming ???

Brief Description

Congratulations, Baron! You are now a feudal lord. How are you going to assert your dominance over your lands, defend against invaders, host the king when he comes to visit, and impress your neighbours? The king has granted you permission to build a castle...

The aim of the project is to build a system that enables its users to design castles. The users should be able to choose and put together architectural elements to construct castles, and see the results. The challenge lies in making the system both flexible and usable, so that the user can construct a castle with rather less repetitive effort than is needed to build in, say, Minecraft, but is also able to create a wide variety of forms and custom details, so there's more to the design than just slotting together a limited set of predefined forms.

Extension

The project could focus on impressive graphics, or on good ways to specify building elements and put them together, so that the user can just concentrate on building really good castles. However, the game could be made more challenging by limiting the user's resources, in money, time, available labour, or building materials. How good a castle can you afford? Do you need it as soon as possible, to guard against imminent threat?

Not all castles are built on flat ground. Some are built on bends in the river, or on peninsulas jutting into lakes, or on the sides of hills. (For example, go and visit Dunottar Castle and Predjama Castle.) Adding landscape features would make the game more interesting and challenging.

What you want the castle to be like depends on what you want it for. Is it primarily for defence, and if so against what sort of enemies? (The advent of effective cannons didn't render castles altogether obsolete, just all the existing castles.) Do you need to make sure you have the right living quarters for a home for your family and retainers? What else do you need? Ideally, the game would incorporate a mechanism for evaluating the success of the design, that could be customised to see the effect of changing rules and weightings.

Variants

Congratulations, Baron! The feudal system is long gone, and so is the need to build a castle for defence. But now that your success in commerce and politics has led you to a noble title and a country estate, you still want to impress the neighbours. What will your elegant (or quirky) country house look like?

Congratulations, Baron! In the modern age, your life peerage isn't going to make you rich. All you can aspire to is a nice detached house, on the new estate Demon Fort Construction are putting up in Great Glen. Design yourself a house making use of the components and customization options offered by Demon Fort Construction's kit house system.

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