Sean O’Neill, Chad McRann, and Justin Loyd Department of Computer Science University of Wyoming What a cool design.

The Idea Originality Puzzle Genre Xbox/PC Difficulty Focus on User Experience Talk about why we chose this idea. We wanted it to be fun, not frustrating to learn/play.

The Game Iceberg Water Start Connected Ice Block Single Ice Block Finish/ Wood Block Deep Water Hot Water Melting Ice Block Mover Penguin Baby Penguin Move Counter Show Screen Shot of the game and illustrate elements.

What we Thought was Easy XNA Most of the object interactions Penguin -> Grid Square Penguin -> Ice Block Ice Block -> Grid Square Single Ice Block Movement Dark water/hot water events Path Detection (TSP) Keep track of directions traversed Talk about why/how these were easy to implement.

XNA Microsoft Visual Studio is our development environment, using XNA framework XNA allows developers to create a game project, and has a library of game functions to make development “quick” and “easy” Allows us to deploy the project on PC and Xbox XNA is what we used to write our game.

And to the Hard Stuff… 3D graphics Differentiating between connect/not connected ice blocks Moving connected ice blocks Splitting connected ice blocks Design to implementation. What we changed, what we didn’t.

Graphics 3D graphics Displaying was easy But having the interactions between objects work properly was difficult Decided to use 2D textures so we could progress through game play and game logic Design to implementation. What we changed, what we didn’t.

Different Ice Blocks Single (1x1) ice blocks were easy to implement Creating different shaped ice blocks was a different story All connected ice blocks needed to know every single ice block it was connected to Tried to recurse through the ice block array to do this, but this made movement difficult Solution: Each ice block gets a unique group identifier! Add a screen shot of a fancier ice block to illustrate our point.

Moving Connected Ice Blocks Problem: How do we move an entire ice block structure in 1 motion? We had to find which direction we were trying to move it Then we had to figure out if each individual block could safely move If 1 fails they all fail, so how do we know if it fails? Add a screen shot of a fancier ice block to illustrate our point.

Moving Connected Ice Blocks… Had to move outermost ice block first Solution: A series of loops which was smart enough to find us this block Add a screen shot of a fancier ice block to illustrate our point.

Splitting Connected Ice Blocks Problem: Splitting an ice block into 2 separate ice blocks Solution: Use Properties to keep track of connections Add a screen shot of a fancier ice block to illustrate our point.

Game Play Demo Show the demo