[shoo]

the game i've enjoyed the most this year is "slay the spire", which is a single player roguelike deck building game. it has a bit of nice art but in terms of whiz-bang graphical effects it only needs to handle a 2D UI for a turn based card game with some bonus effects when actions happen. in this case, the game isn't really about the graphics, it's about the gameplay, which is great.

there was another fantastic turn based strategy game released around a decade ago -- "solium infernum" -- i think this was implemented in some kind of commercial multimedia thing (an adobe product?) by one developer. it had a fascinating system of diplomacy and warfare -- each player was a competing prince of hell, and you weren't allowed to just attack people, you had to have an appropriate pretext (e.g. another player had insulted you, or had refused your unreasonable demands to give them tribute) and set limits to how long the war would run for, and declare up front what your goals for the war were (e.g. capture a particular enemy city). it was fascinating game with a great theme, and crazily enough supported multiplayer via play by email. i played a game with some people that was great fun but took about 3 months to complete, with a few occasions where i'd spend hours before taking a turn trying to grind out the different odds to figure out the best tactics for a particular engagement, or if it was worth taking a certain gamble.

from a tech perspective, the engine wasn't really worth discussing, but it let one developer implement and ship their vision, and the result was pretty great.

edit: there's a pretty good old "programming in the twenty-first century" blog post - "Write Code Like You Just Learned How to Program"

https://prog21.dadgum.com/87.html

(not to argue that either of the games i've mentioned are technically inferior, but the engine tech is entirely secondary to delivering a high quality game with a good experience)

[chupasaurus]

AFAIK Slay the Spire is running in JVM.

[castlecrasher2]

Yeah STS is a pretty interesting case because it's a game from a Java dev who wanted his own thing. So he programmed it by hand (using libraries like LibGDX, of course). The part that impressed me the most is how he mentions he spent two weeks getting the played cards part working, and it shows; I've played a few "card game" video games and STS' has, by far, the best and most fluid playing. As in, when I click and let go it does exactly as I would expect it to.