Justin Dilks

Knights of the Broken Table: Daniel the Squire

Developed for Christopher Ault's senior "Projects in Interactive Multimedia" class and John Kuiphoff's "Web Dynamics" course, both at the College of New Jersey, Knights of the Broken Table: Daniel the Squire pictures a fantasy world where a group of heroes adopts the imagery of the fabled Knights of the Round Table. One such hero, Daniel, must free the other Knights from the clutches of evil, discovering what it means to be a Knight in the process.

This project was developed for Android devices, using the Android Processing environment. The game also stores progress information online, allowing for a player to pick up where they left off from anywhere.

One element of this project that I'm especially proud of is my "Twitter Dungeon," styled more appropriately as "The Temple of the Birds" in the game. This dungeon makes use of the Twitter API, reading a JSON document to see, roughly, how angry users of Twitter are at video games at that particular point in time. The game then scales the difficulty of the Temple of the Birds accordingly, meaning that an especially angry Tweet will generate an especially angry dungeon. The methodology to determine "angry" is unscientific at best, but I think that there's something really neat to this idea that our growing social web could influence the digital experience of a single person.

But we're not done yet! Another game, titled Knight of the Broken Table: The Magic Coin is currently in process of being ported from a board game prototype to a full-fledged digital turn-based strategy game.

I'm hoping to create a unique gaming experience, where games of two different genres, and two different platforms, can share information. The characters that you free in Daniel the Squire will become playable in The Magic Coin, and through The Magic Coin you can unlock new levels in Daniel the Squire. This is an ongoing process, so stay tuned!

Daniel the Squire Daniel the Squire A playtest of the board game prototype of The Magic Coin

Tools Used

The executables below were adapted from the original code for Android.

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