Making a playable game

So the two programs I made earlier weren't really games. You could fly around a plane and explore a terrain in first-person view, but there wasn't any way of winning or losing, no rules, no score, etc. So today I'm starting on an attempt to make a simple fully-functional game. So I had to come up with something that would be relatively simple to program, but still be a full featured game. So then I thought, why not go all the way back to the beginning! The beginning of gaming, that is.

There is some debate about what the oldest surviving board game is, but Senet is one of the three likeliest contenders. It has been found in burial chambers of the ancient Egyptians that date as far back as 3500 BC. (unrelated, but interesting fact: The ancestor of Chutes and Ladders, Snakes and Ladders dates as far back as 200 BC. So if you've ever imagined Jesus playing Chutes and Ladders, it's not really as far-fetched as you would think.) Senet is played on a board that has thirty squares in three rows of ten. The picture below is of a set that was found in the tomb of Amenhotep III who died in 1351 BC. There is some debate about the actual rules for the game, so for my version, I'll be using rules that were guessed at by Senet historians.(I wonder if there will be Monopoly historians in another couple millenia. Side note: I hate Monopoly with a passion that is fiery.) The basic gist of the game is that you roll sticks that served as dice at the time and move your pieces the spaces indicated. The goal was to move all of your pieces off the board. If that sounds familiar, Senet is a cousin of another game that some think is the oldest, Backgammon.

So to make my game of Senet, I'm going to be starting with another sample program that came with the game engine. Below is a screenshot of the chessboard program. The program is demonstrating how to use a 2-dimensional plane like the mouse pointer and the screen in order to select pieces represented in the 3-dimensional space of the game. The program does not come with any rules, you can move any piece to any space on the board. So in order to make the conversion from Chess to Senet, I will have to change the shape of the board(in which I'm lucky. The board is not one model, it is many square models put together, so I can reuse the square models and change the shape of the board within the code. I won't have to create a Senet board from scratch inside a modeling program.), I will have to add some kind of dice-rolling/stick-rolling mechanism, I'll incorporate rules, so that the game will be fully-playable, and at this point I am not planning on programming an AI opponent. At this stage the game will be 2-player only, but if I find that the rules are simpler than I expected, I may add a computer opponent.