Iznik

Quick links: GitHub repository, demo video.

One of my favorite board games is the elegant Azul, published in 2017, in which players compete to cover their walls in Islamic tiles. In the summer of 2020, I obtained a grant through Pomona College from the Fletcher Jones Foundation to teach myself interactive web design by creating a browser-based adaptation of Azul. Employing principles of human-centered design, I first conducted interviews with board gamers who had played Azul and an existing browser-based adaptation. I then modeled the game’s logic in Python. I adapted this into a multiplayer web server using the Flask library, wrote a frontend in React, and hand-coded a website inspired by the pottery of İznik, Turkey from scratch.

Though there remains work to be done in terms of making the frontend more graphical, the result is a fully playable multiplayer online adaptation of Azul — and a respectable first foray into interactive web design. The next summer, I developed these skills in a more professional capacity through my work on OpenPATH at the National Renewable Energy Lab.