Platypotamus

I've started making quick prototypes of games out of captchas, because really, "why not?"  A general post mortem follows.

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I've been working on a little something for a bit now, and have gotten it to the state where I could put a little demo together for you. It generates random titles, and while the demo allows you to title yourself, it's main purpose is to generate titles for monsters found within the dungeon. Check it out!

If you click over on the GAD235 page, I've uploaded the sample files we discussed in class this past week, as well as the Critter base stuff. I've deliberately left comments out of the critter files, as I think it would be a good exercise for you to go through the files and comment them yourself to figure out how it's working, either as a refresher from last quarter, or to bring you up to speed.

For this project, present the user with the option to play any of the following three games:

1. Hangman, pick a word from your wordlist. Display it with dashes in place of the letters. Allow the user to guess letters (or the complete word as a separate option). Give them a finite amount of guesses. After it's over, allow them to play again with a new word, or go back to main menu.

2. Scramble, pick a word from your wordlist. Display it scrambled. Allow the user to guess the word. After it's over, allow them to play again with a new word, or go back to the main menu.

3. Mastermind. Generate a four digit number using only 1-6 for each digit. Allow the user to guess. Indicate how many numbers are correct, and how many are both correct AND in the right spot.

You can make additional combo options of the above for extra credit.

As discussed in class on Monday, you need to create a Card object from scratch, as well as a Deck object from scratch. I have provided you with a test class that you are not allowed to change. It can be found here.

Details on the Card and Deck requirements are found below. I've added 2 small things that we didn't discuss in class, so check it out.

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Due Week 7!

Grab CalendarTester. Fill in the missing functions. There is a pretty good order to fill them in to make your code work with other parts of your code most conveniently, so try and make that happen by reading through all the functions you need first, and figuring out where dependencies lie.

Additionally, in a separate file, Allow the user to enter a number (called n). This is the length of an array for you to create, filled with random numbers between 0 and 2n.

Make functions to do the following:

• Find the biggest number in the array
• Find the smallest number in the array
• Reverse the order of the numbers
• Find the total of all the numbers
• Find the Average of all the numbers
• Extra Credit:  Sort the array, without using the built in sort.

Some key things to study:

• Be comfortable writing loops.  Be able to look at an existing loop and know how many times it executes.  A good sample problem might be to take the stat generator from an earlier class, and make it loop to generate a specific number of stats.  Or loop until you get the roll you want.
• Know random number generation.  The above sample problem would help with that too.
• Be comfortable with the basic math and logic operators.  Know what each does, and their order of precedence.
• Be able to use truth tables to dissect when a compound logic statement is true.  a && (b || !c) is true in what cases?
• Be able to trouble shoot code for bugs.  Hopefully your homework has gotten you used to this, as there isn't much I can tell you to study directly.
• Understand the way that functions work (including parameters and returning values), and be able to separate code out into a function.  CalendarTester will be useful for this.

The first two should be solveable immediately, but the last 3 will require some stuff from week 2, so you'll have to either read ahead, or wait until next week to started on them.

1. Write a program that uses a series of outputs to display ASCII art. Be creative. Your program's output should be better looking than my "Face" program!
2. Write a program that prints out a traces out a series of lines that explains how to calculate the following 5 geometric result: area of a rectangle, perimeter of a rectangle, area of a triangle, area of a circle (you can use Math.PI for pi!), and circumference of a circle. Trace out both an equation showing how it is calculated, and an example calculation, for each one.
3. Generate three random numbers, for the following three variables: balance (Number), interestRate(Number), and minimumBalance (int).

   balance should be some number between 0 and 10,000.
   interestRate should be some number between 0 and 0.1
   minimumBalance should be some int multiple of 100, between 0 and 5,000

   If the balance is less than minimumBalance, charge the user a $100 fee.
   If the balance is at least twice the minimumBalance, double the interestRate.
   Apply the interest rate to the balance.

4. Make a random number generator that simulates rolling 3 (6 sided) dice. Roll them once to determine your base number, and then print it out. Then roll them as many times as it takes to hit that base number again, printing out the total number of rolls. Also print out how many times you rolled higher than the base number, and how many times you rolled lower than your base number. NOTE: Matching your base number just means having the same total. I don't care what the actual dice show. A 12 is a 12.
5. Let's make a dice check game. Rolling 3 6 sided dice again, let's roll until we have successfully rolled each possible result (3-18) at least once. Once this has happened, print out the total number of times each result showed up, as well as what percentage of the time each result showed up.

For a couple of different reasons, it became a really good idea to break dungeons apart into regions. So I did.

Building a Bigger Dungeon

The first of those reasons is efficiency. By breaking the dungeon apart into regions, and placing rooms via those regions rather than seeking a great spot in the entire dungeon, it becomes a much more streamlined process. Not pictured here (unfortunately), I've successfully generated dungeons roughly 6 times larger than are supported with the build here on the site. Unfortunately, the process is still really unstable for large dungeon sizes. I've got a couple ideas for ways to fix that, but they're all massive pains, and I've decided to push them back for now as honestly, do I even need dungeons that big... ever? I see little advantage to it, honestly.

On to some better news, however...
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Several of the projects in the Casual Games class feature a replacement for the mouse cursor. Depending on how you implemented this, you might run into the dreaded "flickering mouse cursor" problem. It was a bit of a puzzler at first, but here's a quick walkthrough on how to solve the problem...

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