Shut the Box goes Gold

(19:30-22:00)

After a brief break I came back to the task to finish everything off. We have the player selection done, and the game done so what was needed was the actual manager and players. These are fairly similar to the ones for hearts so in under an hour I had the game functional.

Next came the about screen. Again, this was just modified hearts code.

Next task was the AI. This was not as easy as I would have liked, and probably isn't needed for this type of game but I had the buttons for a computer controlled player so I might as well add it. My first thought was to simply return a score of 45. And so that is what I initially did.

The none player has to be represented somehow. My thoughts was I want the slot for the player to be visible so that the player knows that there could be a player there. The player class paints a background color and represents information using text fields. A simple setPlayerType that hides the text fields if there is no player was very quick to code.

This left me back with the AI problem. I decided that the best way for the computer to play would be to always roll two dice then to shut the first valid box(es). This would be repeated until there were no valid moves. While this is not the best strategy, I don't want the AI to be too formidable just smart enough to play a game. Besides, I doubt anybody will be playing against the AI so why spend too much time on a rocket scientist algorithm.

A bit of fine tuning and minor bug fixes and the final version is done. Total coding time for this game is under 11 hours. Total time spent if you include my breaks is a bakers dozen hours. Not too bad and it is actually a fun game!

Go to the play game page