Project 1

Technology Notes and User Stories

Technology Notes

The game is a single JavaScript object named war. The game begins on loading and builds a card deck into a 52 element array with each element containing two elements, value and suit. The deck is then shuffled with the Fisher-Yates algorithm and split in half with the splice() method, half going to each player.

The cards that are "in play" are stored in their own array called war.hand. The in-play cards are popped from each player's pile. The game selects the card image to display dynamically: the filenames follow a format (e.g. "1_of_hearts.png") and the code calls for the filename based on the contents of war.hand.

The values of the cards in play are compared and the player with the higher value card gets both cards unshifted to the front of their pile/array. If there is a tie three more cards are placed into war.hand from each player and the display reads I DECLARE WAR. The next click is a normal turn but the winner will accrue all ten cards in war.hand.

The game continues until one player has zero cards and then the game displays Game Over.

The card images are public domain.

Three-player Branch This version alters the HTML and CSS to accomodate a second computer player. The deck is shuffled and a random card is popped so the deck splits evenly among three players with each player receiving 1/3 of the deck. Play proceeds normally with the highest value card of the three 'in play' determining the winner of the round. This version of the game is unfinished. The war3.tie method is only triggered by a three-way tie. Card comparison requires three cards in war3.hand and the decion to deal a player another card is based on thier pile of cards not being empty - those two concepts collide when a player runs out of cards. I introduced a "zero of hearts" to solve the card comparison problem but did not finish accomodating the difference between having one card left and having only the zero of hearts.

User Stories - Master Branch A user should be able to flip over the next two cards (one from my pile and one from the computer's) and have those cards compared so as to determine the winner of that round. The winner of each round should get both those cards accrued to their card pile.

Users should clearly see the number of cards each player has at any given time.

When the values of the cards are tied the game should deal out two more cards from each player face down (i.e., no one ever sees what these cards are) and then the next flip should be worth a total of ten cards (two original, six face down, the two tie breakers).

Users should expect all the things happening with the cards should involve the actual representation of the deck. So the face down cards should come from the deck array and go to the "bottom" of each player's pile.

Users should know when a player has run out of cards and thereby who the winner is.