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Building Circuits

The game is set up as a 5x5 grid of tiles. The tiles are made up of circuit paths, battery crystals, and black boxes with different If I were to design the game again, I would probably have had more components and had a bit more challenging problems. Most likely I would require the completion of a particular task using logic gates. I would also have had a variable sized game board that sized to fit in the display.

The game has a mostly completed problem, the current solution that the player has implemented, and a correct solution. Each level of the game also has a set of components that the player can add to the game board. This list of components is represented by creating inventory items for each of the allowed items and then adding these items to the inventory bar at the bottom of the display.

The game knows from the problem board which slots can have components added to them. If an item on the inventory bar is selected before a valid board position is clicked on, that item gets placed into that location in the playing board. When all the slots in the board have been filled, it gets checked against the proper solution to see if the board has been completed correctly.

The five levels then are simply stored as a set of string which with letters used to represent particular tiles, a list of missing pieces, and a list of the tiles to appear as inventory items. As creating a level editor for such a simple game was overkill, the puzzles were created on graph paper and the tiles converted into letters by hand. This is the technique used by old-school game developers in the early days of game development. While not appropriate for more complex games, for something simple like this it is still quite a valid technique. Remember that the amount of time spent creating tools should be less than the time-savings that the tool will provide otherwise you are wasting valuable programmer time. Granted, most programmers are over-optimistic with their time estimates so it is not that uncommon for a tool to take far longer to develop than anticipated.

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