User:Jamorgan3/enes100/poppit

Link back to team jdjengineers

This is where I discuss my Poppit project.

Instructor assigned the project
My first project was called Chunk Poppit. The class was divided into teams of three or four to work on this project. The project is based around a game called Poppit, a balloon popping game, which can be found on Pogo.com or as a downloadable application from the Google Chrome Web Store. Each team's goal was to pop up as many balloons as possible, analyze the games and their structures, and attempt to write software that would do a better job of popping all the balloons than a human player could.

Write problem statement
Since I wanted to pop as many balloons as possible, I needed to first come up with some problem statements. For example, where should I start popping: the sides, the top, or the bottom? Also, how does the difficulty affect the number of moves it takes to finish a round and the number of balloons left over?

Assign Task1
Since the problem statements are mainly about how my starting location affects the outcome, I will run several tests and examine how starting on different sides of the game will affect the outcome.

Compare actual work done to Task1
I played many games of Poppit, keeping track of my starting point, number of moves, and number of remaining balloons, as well as whether or not I won the game or ran out of moves. While some tests showed that starting from one point eliminated more balloons than other sides, there was no overwhelmingly conclusive data to prove this.

Week1 Narrative
I wanted to test all the variables. I started a new game, made sure it was on the "Easy" difficulty to begin with, and picked a side to start on. I began popping balloons from that side and moved across the board. After each test, the data seemed a little scattered. There was no conclusive data that starting from one side versus the others would make much of a difference.

Week1 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:32, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Assign Task2
I will continue testing, except now I will try to find a correlation between game difficulty and the number of balloons remaining.

Compare actual work done to Task2
I found that changing the game difficulty did not actually affect our games' results as it only changed the number and location of the presents inside of the balloons.

Week2 Narrative
I began playing rounds of different difficulties and trying to find some connection between the difficulty and the number of balloons remaining at the end of a round. However, I noticed that as I increased the difficulty of a game, the only thing that changed was the number and location of the presents hidden in the balloons. These presents are meant to be freed from the balloons, at which point, if the player has removed all the presents, the game is "won". Since this had no influence on the pattern or initial number of balloons, the game difficulty did not affect the number of moves made or the number of balloons remaining at the end of a round.

Week2 Peer Review
Go to each team mates weekly summary wiki page. Read their activities and narrative. Then go the associated discussion page. Say something positive on this page. Try some constructive criticism. Add your name and 1sfoerster 13:32, 28 August 2011 (UTC) to create a time and date stamp. Create a new category if another team mate has already commented here.

Complete Project Page
Team project page ::jdjengineers

Start Next Project Week0 activities
My next project will be HoverCraft