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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. Game Play
Demo
Show the demo