The Best Way to Write Programs
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So, how would you represent the arrows?
The Software Development for the First Year C# Programming course this year is a game I have invented. I’ve called it Evil Squash. It even has its own web site:
The game is very like Snakes and Ladders, but with a twist that makes it a bit like Ludo as well. At the moment we are working on the player movement, which uses a board like the one above. When a player lands on the tail of an arrow they must then follow it to the destination. We have decided that there are three ways that you can implement this behaviour.
- A whole bunch of conditions that hard wires the arrows into the program
- An array with a location for each square that provides a redirection to the destination square.
- An array of “redirects” that holds the behaviour of the 10 arrows
You might want to consider which is the “best” one. To me, the answer is “you can’t say”. Each of them has advantages and disadvantages. Some of them use less memory, some go quicker. Some are easier to test and some are easier to understand.
One of the things that we try very hard to do in the programming course is to get people to think that often there is no “best” way to solve a problem, merely ones that are better than others against certain criteria. We give extra marks to students who manage to use arrays (I’ve nothing against hard wiring the arrows, but I thing showing you can use an array is something that should be rewarded).
Next week we are going to get the player and the “Evil Squash” behaviour sorted, on the way to making a complete game and maybe even some AI powered opponents.
I’m keeping the domain in case we get some good ones (maybe even phone based) that we might want to distribute.
One student has suggested using a Dictionary. Good idea.
