Quarter Final: Greeps Challenge

Over the next two weeks we will be working on an individual challenge to test our creativity, programming skills and organization.

The story is this:

Alien creatures have landed on Earth - they are the Greeps. Greeps like tomatoes. By some incredible stroke of luck, they have landed in an area where piles of tomatoes are found randomly spread out over the otherwise barren land. Help your Greeps collect as many tomatoes as possible.

• Rule 1: Only change the class ‘Greep’. No other classes may be modified or created.
• Rule 2: No additional fields. You cannot extend the Greeps’ memory. That is: You are not allowed to add fields to the class (except final fields). You can use the one byte memory that is provided.
• Rule 3: You cannot move more than once per ‘act’ round.
• Rule 4: You cannot communicate directly with other Greeps. That is: no field accesses or method calls to other Greep objects are allowed. (Greeps can communicate indirectly via the paint spots on the ground.)
• Rule 5: No long vision. You are allowed to look at the world only at the immediate location of the Greep. Greeps are almost blind, and cannot look any further.
• Rule 6: No creation of objects. You are not allowed to create any scenario objects (instances of user-defined classes, such as Greep or Paint). Greeps have no magic powers - they cannot create things out of nothing.
• Rule 7: No tele-porting. Methods from Actor that cheat normal movement (such as setLocation) may not be used.

You can download the Greeps scenario here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bwhy5BkICGK1aFI1SUU5SmVCWUk/edit?usp=sharing

For today, I would simply like you to:

1. Download the zip file
2. Extract the Greeps folder
3. Examine what the program is doing
4. Compare what it's doing with the Rules of the scenario
5. Begin thinking about what sorts of things you could do to make your Greeps more effective
6. Change the "Anonymous" name to your name in the Greeps code.

The top score average [without violating any of the rules above] will win some sort of Greeps Challenge Trophy -- which I have not yet created.  :)

Assignment Today: Work on Mario Game

Hi Guys!  Okay, I played around with the game code a little bit yesterday.  I added some basic sound effects, corrected the "remove Goomba" after it dies, etc.  I also made a "Mario Sounds" folder on the L: Drive (server) that you can copy over to your Sounds folder.

What I want you to do is begin adding sound, playing around with some of the code, and on Monday we'll add a couple extra features.