This is a project that I made in december of 2017 after taking a number of higher level computer science classes. My intention was to see how quickly I could do the introduction level computer science final project using what I knew C++.
After working on the project for 1.5 hours I finished all the features required for the project as well as the extra credit features - which just included a working board and a score. Then I starting adding ridiculous features because I wanted to see how far I could take the assignment. And then I took it too far.
game mode:
- '0'-'9' --- set the base system of the game
- 'w' --- move game pieces up
- 'a' --- move game pieces left
- 's' --- move game pieces down
- 'd' --- move game pieces right
- 'r' --- switch to resizing mode
- 'q' --- quit
resizing mode:
- 'w' --- increase height of the board
- 'a' --- decrease width of the board
- 's' --- decrease height of the board
- 'd' --- increase width of the board
- 'r' --- switch to game mode
- 'q' --- quit
The game works like a normal 2048 game. You hit the 'w' 'a' 's' 'd' buttons to move the blocks around. Your score increases based on the number that was made by merging two blocks. You can quit the game by hitting the 'q' button.
Since the game 2048 already exists in the universe in a fun and playable way, there really wasn't much need for me to create a version of this game that was also fun and playable - so I added a two completely game breaking features which made the game exponentially more difficult to get working (pun intended).
- Changing the base System
- Resizing the board mid game
In order to change the base system, you can hit any of the numbers between 0-9 on the keyboard mid game. This will change the base of of all numbers in the blocks, as well as recalculate the score as if you had been playing in that base for the whole time.
One of the more difficult things to get right was having the board resize itself based on the maximum string length of the integers in the blocks. Note that for base 10 the number length increases and forces the board to resize.
I added the resizing because - frankly - I got so caught up in whether I could do it, that I disregarded whether I should do it. This feature completely breaks the game, and removes any amount of skill required to get a high score.
In order to resize the board in the middle of the game, you need to hit the 'r' button and then use the 'w' 'a' 's' and 'd' buttons as you normally would in game to resize the board. Notice that the background of the board changes color slightly to Alet you know what mode you're in.
One of the really nice looking features that turned out much better than expected was the resizing of the score at the bottom of the board so that it only shows you the part of the score you'd probably want to see if you were playing. As well, if you're playing and choose to resize the board such that there aren't any blocks on the board - the board will give you a new block so that your game isn't stuck.
It's been a little more than I year since I wrote this bad boy, so I decided to try breaking it with somewhat reasonable inputs. How does this program handle negative numbers?
I made a minor change to main.cpp so that setting the base would actually set the base to be the negative version of that base. The change can be seen below:
// lines 141 - 145 in main.cpp
if (temp >= '0' && temp <= '9') {
if (temp == '0') temp = '9'+1;
// originally game.set_power(temp - '0');
game.set_power(-(temp - '0'));
cout << game;
}To quickly explain the above code - the variable ingeniously named 'temp' holds the ascii encoding of the key pressed by the user in the terminal. Here, we normally subtract the ascii encoding for 0 because the 0-9 are encoded as the ascii numbers 48 - 57 respectively to get out the actual number 0-9 that the user intended. We're now negating that number because we want to set the base to be the negative version of the number the user intended.
Apparently this works perfectly! Notice that the score will actually go down when merging two numbers and producing a negative number.