Assignment Details

Assignment: Capture The Flag
Language: Java
Expected time: 3 hours
Actual time: 6 hours
Tests included are written by myself and are not the ones that checked the code for the correctness of the solution.

Task Description

Your task is to implement a simple Capture The Flag game simulation, which also utilizes the rules of Rock Paper Scissors.
There are 3 teams: Rocks, Papers and Scissors. Each team has a certain number of players that are scattered across the map (which is a rectangular grid).
There are also several flags on the map.
Letter F on a map represents a Flag.
A dot . represents empty positions.

Gameplay

The simulation happens in cycles. During one cycle, each player makes a move depending on its team’s custom logic (ordered by their positions, starting from top left corner, going right, then down). Players can move, fight each other (but not the same team) and capture flags. When a player walks on a flag, he captures it - it gets removed from the map and the player is granted 10 points. Once all the flags have been captured, the game ends and the team with most points wins. The game can also end if all players are dead before capturing all flags.

Movement pattern

The general movement pattern of all Players is the following:

• Players can only move one field at a time.

Ultimate goal for each player: capture flags

• If the nearest flag is directly above or below the Player, move up or down respectively.
• Otherwise, move left or right in the direction of the nearest flag.

Teammates

• If the chosen position is occupied by a teammate, don’t move.

Team rules

In addition to the above, each team has its own custom rules to the movement pattern:

Team Rock—represented by letter R.

If the chosen field is occupied by an enemy, fight him.

Team Paper—represented by letter P.

If the chosen field is occupied by an enemy, then move in the opposite direction.
If that position is also occupied by an enemy, fight him.
If moving to the opposite direction would mean walking out of map’s boundaries, then don’t move.

Team Scissors—represented by letter S.

If the chosen field is occupied by a Paper, fight him.
If the chosen field is occupied by a Rock, then move in the opposite direction.
If that position is also occupied by an enemy, fight him.
If moving to the opposite direction would mean walking out of map’s boundaries, then don’t move.

Fights

Fight happens whenever a player attempts to walk on a position occupied by a player from another team.
The rules are the following:

• Rock kills Scissors.
• Scissors kill Paper.
• Paper kills Rock.

After one player kills another, he takes his position.
Winning a fight grants 5 points.

Technical points

The simulation is deterministic (meaning: there is no randomness).
The unit tests are going to check the game’s behavior with a set of predefined scenarios. If these tests don’t pass, it will be assumed that there are some bugs or missing features in the game’s logic.

Unit test checks

All methods that are checked by unit tests and require implementation by the students are marked with throw new RuntimeException("Method not implemented!"); code line.

Key features that are going to be checked by unit test classes:

• ActorFactoryTest - actor creation, actor creation based on given character.
• PlayerTest - simulating fights, getting move directions based on nearest flag position.
• GameUtilTest - utils methods oriented around actors, directions, vectors.
• GameTest - player’s behavior, movement, fight, game simulation conditions.
• GameMapTest - map creation, map-to-string generating, getting actors by positions, getting positions of actors.
• ScoreboardTest - getting ranked players, the best players, for given state of the game.

Hints

For string creation tasks (like GameMap.toString()) it is recommended to use StringBuilder class or simple string concatenation.
Also, when appending a new line, use System.lineSeparator(). Using just \n or \r might cause the unit tests to fail.
For splitting a string into lines, it is recommended to use String[] lines = charMatrix.split("\r\n|\r|\n");

The game’s logic uses the standard coordinate system - (x, y).
However, due to the fact how text-game simulation works and how the Console prints lines, not columns, the actorsMatrix 2D array inside GameMap class inverts the coordinate order—[y, x]. Also, the Y axis is inverted—the lower the number, the upper the position. Watch out for that. Positions and vectors are based on a Vector class in util package.