PacMan
About this Kata
Difficulty: easy
Good for teaching: does doing a SDUF (Small Design Up Front) taking monsters into account make a big difference in design and (initial and/or ongoing) velocity?
Related Katas: GameOfLife - the board design was taken from there. We simulate a game you play continuously with turns.
First performed January 6 during a devnology.nl event at Marktplaats.nl. Kicked off by Marc Evers and Rob Westgeest, initial steps brainstormed and facilitated by Willem van den Ende, programmed by a majority of the participants :)
Problem Description
Pacman finds himself in a grid filled with monsters. Will he be able to eat all the dots on the board before the monsters eat him?
Incomplete list of things the game needs:
- pacman is on a grid filled with dots
- pacman has a direction
- pacman moves on each tick
- user can rotate pacman
- pacman eats dots
- pacman wraps around
- pacman stops on wall
- pacman will not rotate into a wall
- game score (levels completed, number of dots eaten in this level)
- monsters…
- levels
- animate pacman eating (mouth opens and closes)
Clues
You probably won’t be able to complete all of the list in one night of dojo, however having the list (or starting with part of it and letting the participants brainstorm) makes for good design discussions. As in the game of life, a board representation does not have to be difficult. E.g. pacman starts in the centre of the board and is looking up (notice that pacman eats, so the V points downward because pacman has his mouth open):
. . .
.V.
. . .
Pacman looks continuous, however the game state changes in discrete steps. Creating a tick() method/function or somesuch, or passing a board to a function which returns a ’next state’ board makes it easy to test the various conditions.
Suggested Test Cases
see the pacman project on github.com (mostalive/pacman) for actual steps from the first run.
Comments from those who are working on this Kata
Feel free to leave your comments here. I hope you enjoy this kata. WillemVanDenEnde