Robots game

Your goal in this lab is to design and write a program to play robots. This will be a graded lab which you'll work on in groups of two. First, carefully plan out your program. Before doing any programming, you should get your plan endorsed.

Play robots

The UNIX program robots predates the ubiquitousness of graphical interfaces, so you have to play using keyboard input.

  1. In Emacs, type M-x man (for manual-page), and enter robots. This gives your directions on how to play.

  2. In a Unix shell window, type /usr/games/robots.

Plan your program

Your goal is to write a program to play this game. Your game will use a graphical interface, and need not include all the options in the Unix version. You need not include a score file. But you will need to decide on how the user will input decisions on where to move and how to teleport.

Just as Horstmann plans out the Clock game in chapter 8, you should plan out your program. You should have at least two classes (probably more), and should plan on most of your code being in member functions (as opposed to non-member functions).

Decide in advance what order you will write your classes and functions. You don't need to program a whole class all at once. On the contrary, I recommend coding part of it, testing a bit, and continuing. Plan how you will test as you go along.

When designing your classes, you should:

  1. Make a stack of index cards, one for each Class.

  2. Each card has a list of member functions

  3. Each card has a list of instance (i.e., private) variables

  4. Number all member functions and procedures in the order you intend to code and test them. Think about how you will test each procedure, keeping in mind that your program is only partially finished.
You must get your plan endorsed before continuing.

Write a working program

  1. Write a program to play the game. Be sure that the code is clean, and that all procedures are short and clear. (If you have time, feel free to add whatever features you think would enhance or personalize your program, but be sure your code is clean before embarking on ambitious plans.)

  2. Rather than documenting each little member function, place documentation for the class in the class's header file. So each class declaration will have at least one header comment, and each non-member function will have at least one header comment.

  3. Write a file called README which describes the rules for your game. In addition to features, include in the README any bugs in your program. (You may assume that the reader already knows how to play the built-in robots game.)