About Catan

Settlers of Catan is a popular board game, wherein 2-4 players assume the roles of settlers, each attempting to build and develop settlements/cities while trading and acquiring resources (to build more settlements/cities).

The complete set of the Settlers of Catan board game. Image via Catan.com.

At Serenity Forge, we worked on an Android-based tablet edition of the game. Up to 4 players could share a device (or use their cell phones as controllers), play on a virtual board, and use on-device interactions to trade and play cards.

Joining the project near the end of its life, my particular role for the project was to essentially implement a designed user interface (replacing old programmer art), wire that UI up to the game internals, and then polish/QA/bugfix the rest. Below, you can see some examples of the user interactions I worked on.

Examples

Basic gameplay example. I was responsible for implementing the UI and ‘fun’ interactions (e.g. rolling dice, animated shaders, animated card).

More user interactions. Here, players can drag 3D models from their ‘player mats’ onto the board, highlighting valid settlement areas. I was responsible for the drag interactions, as well as the tutorial text cards that show up (“You must place a settlement..”).

My role on the project included adding visual effects and adding general ‘juice’ to the game.

Demonstrating the simple resource trading mechanic. As the game was played on a shared tablet, many UI interactions were meant to be performed via tapping or dragging.

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