Yahtzee Process Statement:
I got the idea for my program when I took a class at Carnegie-Mellon University that dealt with computer programming. That class used Fundamental to teach the basics of programming. Every day for two weeks they taught us how to use different commands and functions in Fundamental. About halfway through the course our teacher told us that we could create a program to show our classmates and parents on the last day. At first I wanted to make a game where you had to click on objects to earn points. Everyone in the class did the same thing so I decided to make a game dealing with numbers and chance. As I thought about it, the game I wanted to make was Yahtzee. I really liked Fundamental and I bought it for my home computer. I recreated and improved my Yahtzee game into the one you have now.
The kinds of problems and solutions I encountered in creating my program were these. Most of my problems when trying to figure out groups of commands that would do certain things. Such as making the Select Difficulty Level affect how many numbers you get. An even tougher one was making the game automatically quit, total your score, print the total number of turns taken and tell you what difficulty level you played on after 13 turns. Most of these problems took a long time to solve but I figured them. I solved the Select Difficulty Level problem with a read screen-string command and a complex series of jumps. I solved the 13-turn problem with a compare number, subtract number, some store and load box, and jump commands. While writing the program I had so many ideas that I would sometimes get lost in the code and forget what I was doing. I had to use comments to help me remember, then I removed them after I finished the game. At first I made task "main" very long with almost all of my code in it. The code was so cluttered I couldn't tell where I was at times. So I broke up my program into 15 subtasks, which made it easier to work on, add additions, and make corrections. Human error also made problems for me. I must have accidentally erased about 10 pictures and sounds along the way. A major problem was that I had to customize all of my graphics and sounds because the ones from the Fundamental CD didn't fit my needs. So I scanned in pictures of dice, edited them in Photoshop 5.0, then imported them. I also made my background in Photoshop 5.0 and recorded my sounds through fundamental.
For future Fundamental projects, I would like to continue improving my Yahtzee game even further by making it less subject to human error. Also I would like to try making a baseball game and a strategy game like a chess game.
My overall reactions to Fundamental and programming in general are that I had a lot of fun creating my game and that I love Fundamental and programming. I think it is a great way to introduce programming to kids. Fundamental is simple to use but very sophisticated when you really get into it. It makes programming a lot of fun for kids of all ages. From just a simple program you can almost make anything you want to, no matter what your computer skills are and have fun doing it. I think Fundamental is a great program and I will recommend it to my friends. I am going to keep creating new games so you will definitely see me in your future contests.
|