The second course that I’ve done on the HHS, is a course that I will always carry with me now. The second course already started off great, because we’re meant to develop a light game. I’ve never done that before and always been interested in it, so I was very excited to start. The biggest reason why I’ll never forget this course, is because I’ve had a “creative session” with my co-project member that kickstarted my big interest in making games. The game that we are meant to develop, has to be OOP programmed and has to be really tested as well.
Summary
Course: I-2 Object orientated Application Development
Completed: Febuary 2010
Gained knowledge
Programming with Java
OOP programming
Programmering with the MVC model
Working with recursive algorithms
Applied Dijkstra Algorithm
Testing with Beslissingstabellentest (Don’t know the translation for this one, will be revised the moment I know it), whitebox testing, blackbox testing, pathing test and algorithm test
Designing class diagrams
Designing sequence diagrams
Writing a manual
I had no idea what to expect. When I heard that we’re going to make a game, I was extremely happy! I always wanted to make a game, but I never had the know-how to actually start it on my own. The timing of this course was perfect, in that regard. Happer is a game where you (as human) have to try and capture the Happer by surrounding him with moving and non-moving cubes. This has to be entirely done in OOP. This is something we didn’t had to do in the previous course, which was explained as well, but now it was extremely important. Creating this game is way easier when you work with objects. The project is a two-man project, so I worked together with Arjen Trouwborst. He’s also one of the students that I work closely together with nowadays.
Arjen is also a skilled programmer, so when we had the first few lessons, we already got started. We went to the library and started playing with the different techniques that we had to apply to create the game. We figured out how to make theplayfield, the best ways of making objects and other similar things. This went pretty easy, because in the first two weeks we already had a playfield and objects that ran around said field. At that point we figured out, that the problems we’ve been facing thus far would all be handled during the scheduled lessons. At one point the teacher even told us to focus more on the documentation and the lessons, because we went too far ahead of the rest of the students.
At that point we started to become a little bored. We focussed on the documentation and had a few problems with some minor detail things that you come across when making class or sequence diagrams, but all in all the project went very smoothly. When the moment came that we were finally able to continue programming, we made very big progress. We created a new playfield in a matter of moments, the same goes for the Happer and the human, and we only really got into some troubles when we started adding the recursive algorithms for the moving cubes. When you move a cube, you also have to make sure that if that moving cube touches another moving cube, then that cube has to move also, etc. Around week 6 we more or less completed everything, so we started to add some other things, that weren’t really necessary. We first made an image, that you can see at the top of this page, which sparked a bit of inspiration for a little story. Later I also found a very nice MP3 class to play music in the game, whilst Arjen was working on improving the Dijkstra Algoritm. Eventually this was born:
As you can see, the story has been overly dramatized and exeggerated. The game itself also has a lot of over-dramatic elements and funny messages. The game is about Knight Rikki, a brave knight, that goes into battle with Evil Yoshi, who wants to free the world of carrots and wants lady Annibelle. It is up to knight Rikki to battle Evil Yoshi and save the land!
The teachers definately could appreciate the humor behind it. One of the teachers even asked me if we weren’t in the wrong education, and if we couldn’t better switch to CMD! We showed the movies above in our sales-presentation, where we tried to sell the game to an actual audience of our choosing (Parents, children etc). It was very well recieved!
Everything else went very smoothly. Testing was a very vague concept to me and we had a teacher that didn’t really help to make things clear. Eventually we performed an Algorithm, pathing and beslissingstabellen test. These are pretty straight forward in how to perform them, but that doesn’t make testing any less vague.
I really enjoyed this project. I learned a lot about Java, but also about my creative insights. Testing didn’t really go well for me.
