Disputes and Diplomacy · Christopher Trafton

Overview

Disputes and Diplomacy is a teaching tool for a political science class. Each student represents a country and plays against classmates over a peer-to-peer connection on the classroom Wi-Fi, managing an economy, building a military and deciding when diplomacy beats force.

Main game screen with a hex map and resource bar — The main screen: the map, the menu bar and the current nation’s resources.

Turn-based gameplay and interactions
Peer-to-peer connection over a Wi-Fi network
In-game economy for resources and buildings
A tile-based map where each tile has its own resources and advantages
A UI designed to make the state of the game clear at a glance

A generated hex-tile map — A generated map.

Architecture diagram of the game — System architecture.

Building the interface

The game logic and UI are written in Java with the Swing library. A single menu bar holds every sub-menu, plus live counters for the current country’s resources.

The project open in the IDE — Development in the IDE.

I built tables with button cells, and the backend logic behind them, for buying units, constructing buildings and researching technology. Buildings placed on a tile raise its resource yield.

Military menu for purchasing units — The military menu.

Combat

Units move from tile to tile to attack or defend. When armies meet, each side’s power is calculated; the loser gives up a proportional number of units and the winner claims the tile.