1. USING THE BOARD TO CREATE (INTERESTING, USEFUL, EXTENDIBLE...) GAMES Troy Vasiga Lecturer, Cheriton School of Computer Science University of Waterloo 6/5/2016 CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 1

2. Outline 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 2  What makes an assignment good?  Introduction and overview of Board class  Motivation  Simple animations and extensions  Dealing with clicks and lines  Larger scale projects  Summary

3. What makes an assignment good? 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 3  Assignments should be:  Interesting  Approachable (for beginning students)  Extendible (for higher level students)  Useful  Related to the curriculum

4. Board overview 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 4  Create one dimensional and two dimensional “Boards” of arbitrary (discrete) size  Boards allow us to put pegs (of virtually any colour) and remove pegs  Boards allow us to place lines between any two positions and remove lines  Boards allow messages to be printed  Boards allow us to obtain their size  Boards allow mouse clicks to be obtained from each position  See handout: BoardReference.pdfBoardReference.pdf

5. My motivation 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 5

6. Pong 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 6

7. Breakout 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 7

8. Kaboom 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 8

9. Fundamentals 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 9  All these games have  Low-resolution (good for the board)  Discrete motion  Simple animation involving a moving ball  Simple animation involving a “blocker”/ “bouncer”

10. Simple Animation 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 10  This program should be accessible to all students  Deals only with method calls  No if statements  No loops  Specification: create a one-dimensional board of size 5. Have a black peg move across from left to right as if it was moving. It should disappear at the end.  Enhancements:  Have it loop  Have it “bounce” back and forth

11. More extensions 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 11  Instead of simply bouncing, let’s have the animation do something more complicated, like go in a spiral.  A static version is shown here: spiral.pdfspiral.pdf  Note the ability for students at various levels to approach this problem:  Simple lines  Static points  Dynamic animation

12. Getting a grasp on clicks and lines 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 12  To begin, we will get a grasp on clicks  This will be the input mechanism to move the bouncer  A nice warm up exercise: linedraw.pdflinedraw.pdf  Simple loop, no if statements, very few variables

13. Simple bouncer 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 13  Let’s create the bouncer  It should move along the bottom of a given board  A click to the right of the bouncer should move it to the right.  A click to the left of the bouncer should move it to the left.

14. Larger scale projects 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 14  Flipper: flipper.pdfflipper.pdf  Checkers  Chess (colours can be different pieces: messages can indicates which pieces are being moved)  Mario-type game

15. Summary 6/5/2016CASCON 2007 Workshop Presentation 15  The Board offers lots of benefit  Little overhead (compared to other graphics libraries in Java)  Discrete, integer based model  Easy to create animation  Accessible to students of all ability (easy to partition assignments into approachable levels)  Free