A small slice of nostalgia from my 2nd year Bachelor at ULB (2016): StoneTrooper was our year‑long team project — equal parts fun, chaos, and “why doesn’t this compile anymore?”.
What we built
- An online card game inspired by Hearthstone, themed around Star Wars
- Client–server architecture so players could connect and duel (At least every February 31st)
- Both A GUI client and a Terminal client.
- Turn logic, card effects, decks, basic matchmaking, and a game loop
Tech and lessons
- C/C++ for the engine, Qt5 for the visual interface
- First “big” collaborative codebase: version control, branches & merge conflicts
- We tried to be agile: weekly iterations, small tasks, quick demos — sometimes, it even worked!
- Takeaway: clear interfaces and protocols are everything in client–server projects
Running it today
It’s a time capsule. Modern machines and toolchains make it… temperamental:
- If you make it run on something else than Linux system, congratulations! (back in the day I had to make a dual boot on my Mac with Linux just to run it. I ended loosing my mac partition in the process. Fun times.)
- Expect some dependency wrangling and build script archaeology
That said, it’s all open if you want to poke around, or try a build (good luck!):
Why it matters (to me)
It was my first taste of a larger project with real moving parts: networking, UI, gameplay logic, and teamwork under a deadline. It set the stage for how I think about architecture (and for keeping READMEs up to date!).
Thanks to the whole team and thanks to C++ for the segmentation faults!
