My plan is to provide a Framework for (m)any possible card games played in rounds by four players. I also want to produce a running implementation of a game called "Coiffeur" with all the AI and different original Rule sets in the game. I'm inspired by the swiss card game called "Jass". It is very popular in Switzerland. It has some similarity to the german "Skat" game. There exist already (similar, simpler) implementations of the game (also commercial) but they don't fit my needs.
The game is played with a card deck of 36 cards. 4 colors with each 9 values. There are four players. The game is played in teams two against two. In the coiffeur game there are 16 possible rule (=32 rounds to play) sets each team can choose from. The scores of every round are multiplyed by the rank of the ruleset (1-16). If a rule set has been played then it is dropped from the available list. The game ends when all the 32 rounds have been played. One game in real life can have durations from 1 to 2 hours! It is a very stategic game. It involves many choices (which rule set? when? which card? when? why?)
My focus in the project lies on the computer AI which I try to solve with different heuristics/strategies involving probabilities. I'm playing around with artificial networks and genetic algorithms too but they don't seem to be very helpful. I'm also considering Fuzzy Logic as a technique to be useful for the AI. In general my intent is to keep database usage as small as possible.
At the moment the project doesn't use any Networking capabilities but I'm willing to add those at a later development phase.
The project is written completely in JAVA because of its OS independance and its OO capabilities. So the code should be highly readable, understandable (and therefore reusable - though it should also serve as a Framework for other card games).
Through sourceforge.net I'm also trying to find contributors or co-developers of my project. Mainly for providing image resources or contributors to the AI development.
The Projects name "JaGaFa" simply refers to "Jass Game Framework"...