Table of Contents
Project Management –
- a) Team Working Assignment
- The expectations of the team a whole
- b) Individual Responsibility Agreement
- The responsibilities and expectations of each team member individually
- c) Project Schedule
- Task due dates
- d) Meeting Notes
- Notes if what was talked about in each meeting
- Business Plan –
- a) User Identification and Interviews
- Interviewing different people about what types of games they like
- b) Electronic/Print Advertisement
- Advertisement of our three games
- c) Pitch Video with Demonstration
- Video that has a description, pitch, and description of each game
- Software Documentation –
- a)Introduction
- Lists the group members and the games
- b) User Manual
- Describes all aspects of the three programs
- c)Program Description for Developers
- Explains the MATLAB game commands and programming in general
- d) Final Algorithm, Flowchart, or Pseudocode
- Flowchart of the three games
- e) Final Program with Comments
- Code of final program with comments
- f) Discussion
- Brief explanation of what occurred during the game’s testing
- g) Conclusions and Recommendations
- Results of the game software,design project, and recommendations for changes to the game if there was more time to develop
- h) References
Executive Summary
Introduction –
For this project, we needed to create a game within MATLAB, although we decided to create 3 games within MATLAB. We conducted a couple of interviews and then decided our games. We wanted to pick 3 good games, but we wanted to make sure that there was a good variety of them, and that we had good selling points for each of them, so we decided to pick Blackjack, Hangman, and Dice (Craps) because they met those prerequisites. The purpose of this project was to gain a better understanding of coding, and to show off our hard work and passion through these games, and then to promote these games through presentations, documentation, and experimentation to replicate a real life engineering/business situation.
Body –
Before we got far into this project, we wanted to code in images into our games, but wanted to do it later on after we got the base code ready. Later on, we realized that we wouldn’t have time to code visuals after coding three separate games, so we had to leave the images out. We first laid out a simple step by step process of each game to grasp a good understanding of exactly how each game was played in an organized way. We then applied these steps to our code for each game, and created the actual code for each game step by step as well. We assigned variables to the players and the cards/letters/numbers, and then basically used nested for loops to replicate the alternating turns in the games, and placed all of the code within a large loop, so that when the winning/losing conditions were met, the loop would break and commence the winning/losing prompt on screen outside of the loop.
Upon completion of our games we have found that the games run very well and run smoothly. Even without visuals, the games are impressively similar to what we had envisioned them being. They are very fun to play, and run with no errors that we have found. There is potential room for error in that we may not have used the official rules for Blackjack as far as betting goes. We didn’t find any rules on betting maximums/minimums throughout the game, or information about starting funds in the game, but we ended up using $500 as the starting funds and made it possible to bet any amount as long as you had that amount in the game at that time. There could also be potential errors within the codes that we simply didn’t catch due to them possibly being harder to find/the conditions for the errors being difficult to meet. We thouroughly searched and tested our games though to ensure that they were high quality games, and that they ran with no visible error to the player.
Conclusion/Future Work –
Through this project, we confirmed that we have truly learned a lot about coding in this class and that we put a lot of dedication, time, hard work and passion into these games. We created something worthwhile. We also learned a lot from the presentation, experimentation, and documentation aspects to gain a better understanding of the engineering/business field, and to create an even more organized and in-depth product. Possible solution for the limitations of this experiment would be to add in a further extension to the “help” function within MATLAB that could pair you with a MATLAB contact to simply give you tips on a certain subject or to help solve a simple issue. This would save a lot of time. Also, a “sharing” function would be great so that more than 1 person could work on a single program. Maybe this does exist somehow and if it does, it should be communicated more clearly, but this would also help groups work collaboratively easier and efficiently. Further studies for this project include a multitude of applications. From electrical engineering to chemical engineering, coding is used in our everyday lives. Coding can be used to make more complex games, make programs for schools/classes, programs for store management, programs for selling/buying merchandise, programs for medical centers, etc. There are many useful possibilities that coding/programming can be used for to help improve our lives and the world around us.