Purpose
In this assignment you will exercise a number of major themes of the course, including software design and implementation, using development tools such as Git and IntelliJ, using JavaFX to build a user interface. Above all, this assignment will emphasize group work.
Assignment Deliverables
The assignment is worth 25% of your total assessment, and it will be marked out of 25. So each mark in the assignment corresponds to a mark in your final assessment for the course. Note that for some stages of the assignment you will get a group mark, and for others you will be individually marked. The mark breakdown and the due dates are described on the deliverables page.
Your work will be marked via your tutor accessing git, so it is essential that you carefully follow instructions for setting up and maintaining your group repository. At each deadline you will be marked according to whatever is committed to your repository at the time of the deadline. You will be assessed on how effectively you use git as a development tool.
Problem Description
The assignment involves implementing in Java, a board game called IQ-twist
made by the games developer SmartGames.
Objective
The game is a puzzle; the objective is to place all eight colored playing pieces onto a board comprising 32 locations (indents) on which up to seven colored pegs may be arranged. The player must place the pieces such that they fit together correctly on the board, without overlaps or gaps. Also, each of the pegs must be surrounded by a piece of the same color, meaning the piece must have a hole in the necessary place. In the photo above, a blue peg at upper right is surrounded by a blue piece, with the peg fitting exactly into a hole in the blue piece. The player will need to place the green and red pieces so that they fit neatly on the green and red pegs, and to complete the game will need to ensure that all pieces are placed with no overlaps and no gaps.
A completed game:
Challenges
A game starts with a challenge which involves zero or one pieces and one or more pegs being placed. Here is what the game above starts like, ready to be solved (this happens to be challenge 1 that comes with the game):
Notice that this particular challenge starts with one piece placed and six pegs placed. Note that the more constrained the player is, the fewer options they have, and consequently the solution to the challenge is, in general, simpler. For example, many of the ‘Wizard’ level challenges that come with the game (e.g. numbers 118-120) have just three pegs placed, which leaves the player with a large number of placements to choose from, and thus creates a much more challenging game. On the other hand, some of the ‘Starter’ challenges (e.g. number 17) have all seven pegs and one piece placed, significantly reducing the player’s options and consequently making the challenge far easier.
Solutions
Each challenge has just one solution. When comparing solutions, we ignore piece rotations that take up the same space on the board. Such rotations are described as symmetric, which is defined in more detail below.
The following sequence shows one possible progression of a solution to the game above (note that the order in which the pieces are played is not important; this is just one possible ordering).
Board
The game is played on a board comprised of 32 locations arranged in a 8×4 grid. In the plastic game, each location consists of a circular depression in the plastic into which a piece may fit, and in the center of the depression is a hole (well) into which a peg may be inserted at the start of the game, to form part of the challenge. Locations are encoded as a digit (1 to 8) followed by a letter (A to D). For example, in the game above, the green peg is in position 3C and the red peg is in position 6B.
Pieces
The game comprises 8 playing shapes, each of which is made of plastic and consists of three, four, or five connected loops (see the photo above). The pieces fit neatly into the depressions on the board formed by the 32 locations. Each of the loops is either filled or has a hole. In the game above, the blue piece at the left has four loops, three of which are filled and one of which has a hole. When pieces are placed, the location and orientation must be chosen such that loops that are filled are not placed on locations that contain pegs. In the game above, for example, in the first step, a blue piece placed is carefully positioned so that one of its holes fits over the blue peg at location 2B.
Each piece can be flipped and rotated at 90 degree increments, allowing for 8 different orientations (four rotations and a flip with four rotations). The following illustration shows all 64 possible combinations of the 8 pieces and 8 orientations. The first four columns show four rotations. The piece is then flipped and rotated four more times. So the fifth image in the top row (a4) illustrates the flip of the left-most image (a0).
Strict Symmetry
Notice that piece c and piece h are symmetric, so the flipped orientations are the identical to the unflipped (for example c0 is identical to c4, and h0 is identical to h4). We describe that
as ‘strictly symmetric’. We ignore the redundant rotations with higher numberings (e.g. c4 is ignored because it is redundant with respect to c0 and has a higher rotation number).
Weak Symmetry
Notice that if we ignore the holes , aside from a, d and g, all pieces exhibit symmetry. We describe these as ‘weakly symmetric’, and thus take up exactly the same space on the board. We ignore the redundant rotations with higher numberings (e.g. if a solution could be made with eithere0 or e7 then we ignore the solution with e7 because it is weakly symmetric and has a higher rotation number). Other examples include b0 & b2, c0 & c2, f0 & f6, and h0 & h2, each of which are identical pairs if we ignore the holes.
Pegs
The game has seven pegs. There are two green, two blue and two yellow pegs, but just one red peg. The pegs are not placed by the player during the game, but rather, they one or more pegs is placed on the board at the start of the game as part of the challenge. In the
example above, two blue, two yellow, one green and one red peg are placed to form the challenge, as well as a green piece. The player has to place the remaining pieces. The particular challenge illustrated above is challenge one in the booklet that comes with the IQ-Twist game.
Legal Piece Placements
For a piece placement to be valid, the following must be true:
All loops comprising each piece must be placed on valid board locations (no part of a piece may be off the board).
All loops comprising each piece must be placed on vacant board locations (pieces may not overlap).
No piece may be placed over a peg, except where the peg is the same color and the location of the peg coincides with a loop that has a hole. For example, in the game above, the blue piece at the left is placed such that it fits on the peg at location 1C.
Encoding Game State
Game states are encoded as strings. Your game will need to be able to initialize itself using these strings and some of your tasks relate directly to these strings.
Placement Strings
A placement string consists of between one and eight (inclusive) piece placements (pieces a to h), and between zero and seven peg placements. The placement string may not include any piece twice, and may not include more pegs than are available (so it may not include two or more red pegs since there is only one in the game, and it may not include three or more of the other colored pegs, since there are only two each of those in the game). A completed game must include right piece placements. Each piece placement is described using four characters. For example, the game described above is characterized (when complete) by the string a7A7b6A7c1A3d2A6e2C3f3C4g4A7h6D0i6B0j2B0j1C0k3C0l4B0l5C0. Note that the placement string is ordered (piece a first, and piece l last), which is a requirement for valid placement strings.
Piece Placement Strings
A piece placement string consists of four characters describing the location and orientation of one particular piece on the board:
The first character identifies which of the eight shapes is being placed (a to h).
The second character identifies which column the left of the piece is in (columns are labelled 1 to 8).
The third character identifies which row the top of the piece is in (rows are labelled A to D).
The fourth character identifies which orientation the piece is in (0 to 3 for four rotations, and then 4 to 7 for four flipped rotations, see the illustration of all 64 piece orientations above).
The image above shows the first and fourth characters for each of the pieces in each of their orientations (64 in total). For example, at top left, ‘a0’ describes piece ‘a’ at orientation ‘0’. Below it, ‘b0’ describes piece ‘b’ at orientation ‘0’. At the bottom right ‘h7’ describes piece ‘h’ at orientation ‘7’. And so on. A piece placement string starts and ends with these two characters and has two more in between which describe where the piece is placed.
Peg Placement Strings
Peg placement strings follow exactly the same format as piece placement strings, however, pegs use the characters i (red), j (blue), k (green), and l (yellow), and the rotation is always 0 for a peg placement, since it makes no sense to rotate a peg, which is round.
Example Placement String
The progression of twelve images above shows the progression of the game a7A7b6A7c1A3d2A6e2C3f3C4g4A7h6D0i6B0j2B0j1C0k3C0l4B0l5C0, starting with the starting state f3C4i6B0j2B0j1C0k3C0l4B0l5C0, then adding piece d with its left in column 2, its top in row A, and rotated and flipped to rotation 6, which is encoded as a piece placement of d2A6. The resulting placement string is d2A6f3C4i6B0j2B0j1C0k3C0l4B0l5C0, etc.
Part 1
Create a fully working game, using JavaFX to implement a playable graphical version of the game in a 933×700 window.
Notice that aside from the window size, the details of exactly how the game looks etc, are intentionally left up to you. The diagrams above are for illustration purposes only, although you are welcome to use all of the resources provided in this repo, including the bitmap images for each of the eight shapes.
The only firm requirements are that:
you use Java and JavaFX,
the game respects the specification of the game given here,
the game be easy to play,
it runs in a 933×700 window, and that it is executable on a standard lab machine from a jar file called game.jar,
Your game must successfully run from game.jar from within another user’s (i.e.
your tutor’s) account on a standard lab machine (in other words, your game must
not depend on features not self-contained within that jar file and the Java 8
runtime).