Through the development of Othello and Craps in MATLAB, is was most prominently noted that though MATLAB was an excellent tool for developing computational and representational applications, it was not very suitable for dynamic games. Neither Othello nor Craps inherently required dynamic elements such as animations, but it was noted while attempting to implement these additional features that MATLAB seemed to lack a satisfactory method for doing so. The imshow function was useful for presenting static images, but seemed unsuitable for presenting frames in quick succession to create animations.
The method of receiving user input in Othello was likewise awkward in MATLAB. In Othello, players could click directly on the board image to place a disk at the space under their cursor location. Implementing this was much more difficult than expected, because MATLAB seemed to lack an elegant method of accurately querying the cursor position on the figure. This was likely due to the fact that figures in MATLAB were more intended primarily for static presentation of graphics and plots, rather than receiving user input.
Had MATLAB not been the required for this project, we would recommend that the games be written in a lower-level language for greater flexibility (e.g. C or C++), along with a development library for interfacing with graphics, audio, and user input (e.g. SDL or SFML).