Homework 10 - Small Project
Due Friday, December 5, 2014 (the class before the last!)

This project will be the capstone of the overall course. You will have two weeks to work on it, but there will be several intermediate deadlines that you need to follow on the way to your presentation during the last class. It is important, therefore, to start early and try to make it the jewel on your multimedia game experience cap.

Your project will be to implement a non-trivial puzzle or game from Scott Kim's web games list except "Random Jargon". You will choose which one you want to work on and inform me via email early on. You will also need to create your own graphics, but retain the functionality of the game. If you so desire, you can also choose your own game but you will need to get approval for that (to verify that it is doable and of comparable challenge).

Once you have chosed an exciting and reasonably doable game, you will create the storyboard of your game, figure out the programming complexities and design it in detail before programming and testing it. In addition to the final class presentation, we will have several in-class critiques so that you can get constructive feedback from the rest of the class. Start by examining some of the past student puzzles and Scott Kim's games.

You will have a few days to choose to implement a variation of one of these games or design your very own game. If you design your own game, you have to seek my permission to implement it.

Deadlines - Your physical presence in class is required for all starred dates

Wednesday, Nov 19: Game choice. You must send me email indicating which puzzle you choose to do. The subject line of your email should contain the proposed title of your project. Please do that in all subsequent emails related to your project (there are too many for me to remember all at once ;-)

* Friday, Nov 21: Storyboard presentation, along with a document explaining your game rules in detail. It is crucial to get the design right, so that you can continue your development with confidence. You will have 3-4 minutes to present your storyboard to the class and listen to their comments. Remember, they most likely do not know the game you plan, so you want to explain what it is about, its rules, and how your design will facilitate playing it on the computer. They will give you feedback on any problems they see and suggestions on how you might avoid the problems.

* Tuesday, Nov 25: In-class critique of the MAIN screen. The main screen is where the action of the game is happening, the screen that the user will look at most of the time as she is playing the game. It is not the "splash screen". The critique will focus on your coice of colors, type, quality of images, position of elements. No functionality is required.

* Tuesday, Dec 2: In-class critique of the remaining screens and work in progress of some functionality. By now you should be making considerable progress in your programming.

* Friday, Dec 5: Completed project due. You need to do three things:

1. Place your files inside the ps10 folder inside your cs215 directory. Your .dir file should be no larger than 5 MB. You should name your game files in a way that reflects the nature of the game (e.g., pacman.dir). Clean up your ps10 directory so that only the essential files are there. Place any non-necessary files in a subdirectory called stuff
2. Bring back (if you took them) the storyboards and place them in the classroom.
3. Create and email me a small square snipet of your game, like the ones you see in the past student puzzles. The size of the snipet should be 100 by 100 pixels in jpg or png format. Name it to match your game's (e.g., pacman.jpg).
4. Create a Projector with your game and place it in the middle of the desktop of the computer you are using. Name the file with your name and its title so that people can easily locate it.

Saturday, Dec 6: : On this day, send emails with your testing comments to those people and cc your instructor so that you will receive credit for your testing.
Using the Projectors that we created on the Lab machines, test the projects of those appearing before and after your name in the circular list (Sarah comes after Asiya) of students in the class.

• Sarah Foster Bailin: (sbailin)
• Hannah Glasser: (hglasser)
• Katherine Louise Hunt: (khunt)
• Katharine Patricia Hyslop: (khyslop)
• Alexandra Goldie Levy: (alevy2)
• Giovanina K. Mier: (gmier)
• Grace Ruixin Ming: (gming)
• Sandra Eunjin Park: (epark7)
• Bianca Dang Pichamuthu: (bpichamu)
• Amy Yue Qiu: (yqiu2)
• Lucy Jiang Shen: (lshen)
• Katarina Salisbury Shewchuk: (kshewchu)
• Asiya Yakhina: (ayakhina)

* Tuesday, Dec 9 by 11:59PM: Tested project due: You should test and correct your own projects. In the folder called final-project in your cs215 directory place your tested project.