CST 205 - Week 6

Final

The lion's share of our work this week was dedicated to the Final. We decided to make a text-based game that also utilized image manipulations and sound effects. The basic design of our game was to replicate the iOS game Reigns, in which the player assumes the role of a monarch and is given two dichotic choices that influence their kingdom in some way. Our game takes that gameplay conceit and tasks the player with balancing 4 "categories" of their kingdom. With every choice either increasing or decreasing different elements of their kingdom. If any category reaches 0, they lose. But, if they outlast all the scenarios with all categories intact, they win.
This program was very much a team effort, with everyone contributing to the project in some way. Before we began any programming, we first had to make our own assets to include in the game. Tayler sourced sound effects and music. I made the icons to represent the different categories. And Brad made a background for the game and wrote most of the scenarios that our player would have to decide between.
Once we started programming, Tayler had figured out how to start the music playing in a separate thread, and continue to play the music until the game was over. My job for the project was mainly to handle painting the icons onto the game board and dynamically adjusting them to show the player how well that category was doing. A dynamic "life-bar" that filled up the icon itself. This was probably the most complicated program I've worked on so far, so it was a fun challenge to write something that had to fit into a bigger framework. I also wrote a getter function for the game loop to choose a random text scenario out of our complete dictionary, and pop the scenario out so it is not used twice. This function also tells the main game loop that the player has won once there are no more scenarios to choose from.
We were all very happy with the result.