F. Discussion

There were some mishaps in the beginning when we did the final testing of Connect Four. This was due to the fact that we did last minute changes to the code for the game and we were not conscious of the fact that these changes would probably make a difference to the code. We have the code hidden from the player though so they were not able to recognize there was something wrong with the code. We were able to troubleshoot the issue and were able to run the game for the final testing. During the actual testing, everything went smoothly. The first level of difficulty was chosen at first, and we went through the game pretty quickly. However the hardest level of difficulty was chosen when we decided to have another round of Connect Four, to test out how smart the Artificial Intelligence is. The Artificial Intelligence worked very well against the player, until the end when the player used a mechanism that is used in the physical game to play against the computer. The player eventually figured out how the Artificial Intelligence thinks to use this mechanism against it. Usually those who play the games, are not able to figure out how the AI thinks and usually loses against the AI because they are not able to think ahead. We also added the drifting effect to slow down the dropping of the chips. This allows players to be a little more relieved, because before the AI placed its own chips at the same time as the player. This is also an advantage to the player so that they can see where to place their chip when it comes to their turn. The coding of Connect Four took much more thought and power to enact because of the different levels of difficulty with the addition of an Artificial Intelligence in the last level. Eventually, we were able to figure out that if we use loops within loops, the game should run as want it to. After letting classmates play the game, we were given the recommendations of adding the drifting effect to allow players more time to figure out their next move.

 

The final testing for Hangman went much more smoother than Connect Four. There were no last minute changes to this code because we were much more confident in developing this game’s code than Connect Four. The reason is because there are no levels of difficulty other than the different categories of words. The only difficulty we ran into was if we wanted to include spaces between words into the game or not. We did not know how to incorporate spaces into the coding because we were unsure of what spaces in between words are translated into as MATLAB coding. Some of our team members have experience in other forms of programming and knew how to translate into other programs’ codes, but were not sure how it would translate in MATLAB.