Featured Project - Checkers
About the Assignment
This assignment involved setting up a checkers board for a checkers game. It did not require the addition of the actual game play mechanics, but it did require the development of an interactive highlight feature. Whenever a player moused over a piece the background becomes yellow. I was able to get all these features working properly. The key takes aways from this program for me was learning from past mistakes. In Sokoban I did not make the background static which caused me problems down the road. In this program I created the checkerboard/background in the constructor. After this I did not have to worry about losing visuals when the dynamic elements were introduced, since everything would be layered over this background. In the constructor I also loaded all the textures into a texture into a map. This allowed me to access them at my convenience at anytime in my other functions. In my constructor I loaded the pieces into my piece matrix. Which in my head was a separate entity. In the draw function the checkerboard and matrix would be brought together to generate the game time board. It was here that I made an interesting design choice. In the class Checkers there existed a matrix that contained an object from the piece class. It was these pieces that contained all the information the game required for movement and visuals. I treated my board as a matrix filled with light bulbs, where a light is either on or off, light is visible, or it is not visible. In the same vein the entire matrix was filled with pieces but somewhere on while somewhere off. This was so in future assignments when I needed to move a piece, I didn't actually move anything I simply turned one piece off and another on. This also played into the selection feature of a piece. A piece is either selected or it is not. When it was turned on it communicated to the draw function that it needed to draw a highlight before the piece. Since this is all contained to the pieces and by extension the matrix they exist in, it is impossible for the user to alter the integrity of the background. I feel that my development of this program grew Sokoban and better channeled Object-Oriented Programing principles. I did run into a new problem. The problem was a result of left over input from the mouse causing extra input to affect the program, this was resolved by creating a clearMouseBuffer function. A simple function that loops while the program picks up extra input data.
Key Elements Discussion
There are two elements that were central to this assignment, the first being the vector. I used a vector to create a matrix in which I placed and stored store game pieces which were crucial to this program. Pieces are a class used to give each piece characteristics that allow it to interact with the checkers in main as its own little interphase, that builds into the entire checkers’ game. This program helped me to continue to develop my understanding of object-oriented programs. And, while I did not have to implement any complicated algorithms for this project, it did give me the opportunity to build off my failures in the last assignments.