macOS Need game idea for my first year Java student

[toddburch]

My son, 17, a Junior in high school, is finishing up his first year of Computer Science. He's been learning Java all year.

He's been assigned a final project to write a simple game. I'm looking for some good ideas to help him get started and motivated.

It needs to be console based - they didn't get into AWT much at all, and certainly nothing with any 2D or 3D graphics.

I wrote a hangman game for somebody else here not too long ago, but that might be a little advanced for his understanding.

Any help with ideas is appreciated. (Motivation is the biggest obstacle..., if you know what I mean with a teenager!)

Todd

 

[psingh01]

tic-tac-toe? some kind of card game? or a crossword puzzle?

you can have "ascii graphics" on the console/terminal by printing out control commands to the terminal. You'll have to know what those are though (say for a VT100 terminal) and make sure that what you are running on is emulating such a terminal.

That way you can have some kind of screen and not just print out a new line everytime you want input and output. Think of the "top" command how it just refreshes on one screen instead of constantly outputting everything over and over.

 

[lee1210]

Multiple choice trivia is very easy. You can spice it up with point values that decrease with time to respond/incorrect guesses. It could be multiplayer with different keys used to select each choice per player.

Tic-tac-toe is easy. In a college course we programmed tic-tac-toe in Java, but allowed for a computer player. Making it for 2 human players is quite easy. We had to make a computer player that would never lose, so it was a bit more involved. We could also pit two computer players against each other a la WarGames.

A card game for two humans might be decent. Gin or Poker. The machine should be good at "shuffling" the deck, tracking a discard pile, what's in each player's hand, etc. It would be hard to obscure the hands from the other player so he might need to have a key that, when held, would show one player's hand, and another to show the other player's hand, etc. Making a computer player wouldn't be hard as long as there were defined rules. 21 would be the easiest to do with a computer player, and just pick what the behavior is at each value (16 hit, 17 stand, etc.).

While the display might be a little difficult w/ text, connect 4 for human players is pretty easy.

Checkers for human players wouldn't be too bad, but again the display is rough in text. You'd need a "sprite" character for each red checker, each black, and a different character for a "kinged" red or black piece. The rule system shouldn't be too hard to code, though.

I wish I had taken 2 years of programming in high school.

-Lee

 

[psingh01]

Multiple choice trivia is very easy. You can spice it up with point values that decrease with time to respond/incorrect guesses. It could be multiplayer with different keys used to select each choice per player.

Tic-tac-toe is easy. In a college course we programmed tic-tac-toe in Java, but allowed for a computer player. Making it for 2 human players is quite easy. We had to make a computer player that would never lose, so it was a bit more involved. We could also pit two computer players against each other a la WarGames.

A card game for two humans might be decent. Gin or Poker. The machine should be good at "shuffling" the deck, tracking a discard pile, what's in each player's hand, etc. It would be hard to obscure the hands from the other player so he might need to have a key that, when held, would show one player's hand, and another to show the other player's hand, etc. Making a computer player wouldn't be hard as long as there were defined rules. 21 would be the easiest to do with a computer player, and just pick what the behavior is at each value (16 hit, 17 stand, etc.).

While the display might be a little difficult w/ text, connect 4 for human players is pretty easy.

Checkers for human players wouldn't be too bad, but again the display is rough in text. You'd need a "sprite" character for each red checker, each black, and a different character for a "kinged" red or black piece. The rule system shouldn't be too hard to code, though.

I wish I had taken 2 years of programming in high school.

-Lee

You don't need sprites...just a 'B' for a black checker and a 'R' for a red one and 'BB' and 'RR' for the Kings or better yet 'O' and 'X' to differentiate instead of B and R.

 

[lee1210]

You don't need sprites...just a 'B' for a black checker and a 'R' for a red one and 'BB' and 'RR' for the Kings or better yet 'O' and 'X' to differentiate instead of B and R.

That was what I meant, I just said sprite because I wasn't sure what else to call it (indicator? piece-representing character?). Maybe just a lowercase b and r and upper case B and R when they're kinged.

-Lee

 

[GoGoPoCoSo]

One of the more memorable games I did in first-year Java class was to create an interactive program that was a re-creation of "The Animal Game", and with a .txt file containing all of the questions and answers from the site (and a few others containing much fewer questions), implement binary trees to get the program working. Helped a lot with understanding recursion. Was fun, console-based, no graphics, first-year program, seems to fit along with your description...

The Animal Game:
http://www.animalgame.com/

 

[Cromulent]

How about Conway's Game of Life?

 

[Pring]

Battleships is fairly easy to lay out and implement and allows him to demonstrate good use of data structures.

 

[lee1210]

One of the more memorable games I did in first-year Java class was to create an interactive program that was a re-creation of "The Animal Game", and with a .txt file containing all of the questions and answers from the site (and a few others containing much fewer questions), implement binary trees to get the program working. Helped a lot with understanding recursion. Was fun, console-based, no graphics, first-year program, seems to fit along with your description...

The Animal Game:
http://www.animalgame.com/

This isn't related to the OPs question, just a comment that that is awesome. The only things I tried that it didn't get were scorpion and caribou (the latter might have been my fault)... but it was getting all sorts of things. Duck-billed platypus, anteater, sting ray, hyena, human, koala, rhinoceros, emu. Much fun, and a good suggestion for this topic, to boot.

-Lee

 

[Catfish_Man]

Very simple RPG. The one I made my first year basically presented a list of options ("go", "quit", etc...), generated random terrains either with or without a monster on them, and if there was a monster you could attack it or run. 1/10 terrains would be a town where you would be healed. After you accumulated N gold from killing monsters, and then reached a forest, you won. The second version had leveling up, buying improved gear, and a few simple spells.

The third version was somewhat ill-fated. I bit off a bit more than I could chew, attempting to have a map with an array of function pointers on each tile that were executed on entering, allowing scripting triggers and such.

 

[lazydog]

Hi Todd,

There were a couple of books published in the late 70', 101 Basic Computer Games. Though the games are all text based, they cover a wide range of topics and I think your son might find inspiration from the list of games, I certainly did many years ago! You can read one of the books online here.

b e n

 

[Spritey]

My son, 17, a Junior in high school, is finishing up his first year of Computer Science. He's been learning Java all year.

He's been assigned a final project to write a simple game. I'm looking for some good ideas to help him get started and motivated.

It needs to be console based - they didn't get into AWT much at all, and certainly nothing with any 2D or 3D graphics.

I wrote a hangman game for somebody else here not too long ago, but that might be a little advanced for his understanding.

Any help with ideas is appreciated. (Motivation is the biggest obstacle..., if you know what I mean with a teenager!)

Todd

I took a year of java as well, and I had to write a lottery "game" for java 1 (pick 7 out of 49 numbers or something, then have the computer randomly draw 7 numbers and see if your chosen numbers win.).

For java 2 I wrote minesweeper, all console based. My board looked something like this.
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Think I used o and x to indicate mines or open area or something. And you could vary the board size, within reasonable limits of course. I wasn't great at java, and I managed to do it within a reasonable time. I did some research online to point me in the right direction, as it could be a little tricky to come up with the structure at first.