Game Programmer
Android Projects
Technology: Android Studios
Date: Fall 2021
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These was created during an android development class in my fall semester, during my third year, at Champlain College. The first project was an implementation of Conway's Game of Life. For the second project, I made chat which received and sent text information to a server and when read would displayed it to the user in a style fitting of a primitive social media, as shown below.
Conway's Game Of Life
The purpose of this project was to recreate Conway's Game of Life with additional features to add to the game in a cosmetic sense. The program has a start and stop button, as well as the ability to save the current state of the board and load it later on. You can change the color of the cells between 4 different colors and open a new instance of the program with the current cell layout on that instance. Shown below is how the data is bound to the cells:
This program uses a grid recycle view to map the cells to in a grid like patter, with each cell being parsed from the recycle view and updated based on the results of user input and the algorithm behind the scenes which determines if a cell should come alive, stay alive, or die based on the number of alive cells around each cell. Show below is the visualization of XML layout for the grid
Added functionality like: Color, Save/Load, and Cloning, provided some interesting challenges which would help with later projects like the next project, Chit Chat. The save and load functionality were all about reading and writing to a text file the grid values, while the cloning process was a mainly a duplication of the existing activity. Changing color involved keeping track of integer variable which corresponded to the 4 available colors.
Chit Chat
For this project, I was given access to a server and had to create a program to request data from the server, parse through and display to the user. If the user liked, disliked or made a post of their own I needed to update the server to reflect these changes. Pictured below is a portion the of function I used to parse the data from the server:
When creating the visuals for the player, I used a recycle view with a set layout for the what each message should be displaying. Each button was given it's functionality prior to being added to the recycle view, and when clicked would trigger an update to the server just as any new post would. Pictured below is the visualization of the XML files for the chat and messages:
For sending data to the server, each type of data needed its own task. Each task has its own variation of server url and those are send in an attempt to request access to alter data. In the case of an actual message, the text is added into the request which contains the url and any other data which is needed to either send to the server or prove credentials.
