Overview

Languages: Java
Frameworks: IntelliJ
Team: I worked with my project partner, Andrew
Timeframe: The Random World Generator, including initial ideation and structure, was completed in a week, while the interactivity and game mechanics were completed the week after.
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For Escape Room, I designed and built the Random World Generating Engine that we eventually used, as well as the Load/Save feature.

Andrew implemented the loading screen and wrote the Line-of-sight feature that was key to our game mechanic.

All other features, including the interactivity, health bars, mouse-hover descriptions, we both worked on together.

Takeaways

As one of the largest software projects I've ever built with a partner, this project taught me so much about managing complexity and handling scale in projects. Escape Room:

● really impressed upon me the importance of abstraction - of how it's really helpful to create basic building blocks first, before layering functionality on top of these building blocks.
● taught me the importance of time management, especially since this project happened during a particularly busy period of my school year.
● taught me a lot about communication and working with another engineer, something that I don't often chance to do in a classroom environment.

Concept

Overview

We began the project with a collection of TETile objects, which was given to us as part of what was provided in Berkeley's Data Structures class (CS 61B). There were different tiles, and each tile represented a unit of space in the rendered world - we then figured out how to put these tiles together in different ways to create the game.

Random World Generation

Essentially, the world consisted of rooms and corridors, and each time a new seed was entered, random numbers of rooms/corridors of random sizes/lengths were generated.

I'm not allowed to go into deep detail, but essentially we had a function which generated the random number of rooms/corridors, whose output fed into functions that created the rooms/corridors with random sizes.

Interactivity

Interactivity was achieved through a Listener that listened for particular keystrokes. Certain keystrokes (WASD, for instance) corresponded to certain actions, and when these keystrokes were pressed, the world was re-rendered accordingly.

Save/Load

One of the most challenging parts of the project, save/load was achieved by having our world object extend serializable. This allowed the world to be written to a .txt file, which we can later read from to re-render the world.

My initial, naive approach was to iterate over every single tile in the entire world, and save a digit corresponding to each tile in a .txt file: so a black tile might be '0', a flower might be '1', a player might be '2' etc.

However, not only was this not as elegant, but saving in this manner also did not preserve the randomness native to the original file.