Projects / Cluedo
University Year 2 Group Project
The Cluedo video game was developed in the second year of my BSc Computer Science degree on a team software engineering project. I worked with five other undergraduates over the course of the year researching, designing, planning, coding, testing and report writing. Team roles were assigned, schedules were planned but everyone got to do a bit of everything and the end result was the second highest marked software engineering project of our year.
Feature List
- Two forms of AI (basic and skilled which has the ability to deceive)
- XML based game loading and saving
- HTML based help system
- Game sound effects
- Customisable suspects and weapon sets
- Map editor with ability to load custom images and create custom room/cell linking
- Variety of different map styles included
- Easy to use interface including allowed move highlighting
- Detective pad for keeping track of suggestions
- Different rule set for new game mode
Skills gained/developed
- Research and analytical skills
- Design skills
- Skills with artificial intelligence
- Asset creation
- GUI and game input handling skills
- UML diagram creation skills
- Designing reusable components
- Experience integrating localisation support
- Working in team working environment
- Problem solving and programming experience with Java
- Report writing
- Testing and bug fixing skills
- Evaluation skills
- Experience with design patterns
- Unit testing experience
- Experience creating XML data driven systems
- Time management skills
Cluedo really turned out to be a massive undertaking even with a team of six. Good communication was vital throughout as we fought to parallelise tasks to ensure schedules were met. A good number of less important features we wanted to add had to be de-scoped but by the end of the project we had a well polished finish product.
Trivia
- One of our team members was so enthusiastic about the final game that he actually continued developing the project himself after he finished university adding network support and various other features.
- During development we created a powerful map editor to help create our maps. It turned out to give us a massive advantage over other groups who adopted hard coded solutions as we were given a complex map to integrate towards the end of the project.
- The user defined cells created in the map editor were also used to create highlight effects in game for path tracking and movement range previews.
- Our team had quite a range of language skills and so we provided the different translations ourselves.
- Only a few of our team had ever played Cluedo, so we all chipped in together to buy the board game and played several games to get a better understanding of what it was about during the design phase.