A New Project: Dark knight 2

When I was a kid there was a TV show I used to watch on BBC which was a game show with various mini games.  One of them was my ultimate favourite and it was called the Dark knight.  After ages searching around Google and Youtube and endless useless forums posts on Batman etc I finally found the right video and the right show.

The Game was called the Dark Knight, the show was called Incredible Games and took the format of a group of contestants in an Elevator in a massive building.  The elevator would stop at a floor where there would be a game or a challenge for one or more of the team to complete.  The more challenges completed the more points the team won and the higher they got to go up the building.  The ultimate goal was to reach the top and win the grand prize.

Here's a video showing the Elevator - voiced by David Walliams and the game I loved, the Dark Knight:

There exists a 7 by 7 Game board.  On that board there are 3 entrances and 3 exits.  3 players have to make it from one end of the board to the other.  The obstacle takes the form of the Dark Knight.  A sinister opponent whose goal it is to capture as many of the team as he can.  The team gets to move 2 times before the Dark Knight begins to move.  Everyone can only move one square at a time.  The Dark Knight supposedly cannot see where the players are but can see the last square they occupied, which is lit up white - in most situations that means given the white light square, there are 4 possible location the player could be standing.

If I recall correctly you also cannot move back onto a space you already held and the three exit squares are 'disposable' i.e. once used they cannot be used as an exit again, they become normal squares.

Pretty clear set of game dynamics, straight forward constraints, possibly tricky to implement but not impossible.  I made a version of this game in Visual Basic while in college but I had made it from memory and a few of the above constraints were not included - for a start the version I made had one player and one knight.

I have decided that I am going to make another version of this though, which will be made in Java, and for compatibility I will use 1.6 which most people should have and hopefully once complete I'll add the web-start page to this blog for anyone to play who may be interested.  This is purely just for fun though.