Deadlines

Warning: There are 3 deadlines for this project, and some deadlines require you to submit multiple deliverables. Please double-check that you submitted everything!

Assignment	Tasks	Deliverable	Points	Due Date
Partnership	- Task 0: Partnerships	Nothing	0	Sunday, Jul 26 12:00 PM PT
Project 3A	- Task 1: Setup - Task 2 (Optional): Design - Task 3: World Generation	World Screenshots on Gradescope	3	Mon, Aug 03 11:59pm PT
Project 3B	- Task 1: Main Menu - Task 2: Interactivity - Task 3: HUD - Task 4: Saving and Loading - Task 5: Pathfinder - Task 6: Ambition Features	Code on Gradescope (0 pts, but required for checkoff)	0	Sun, Aug 09 11:59pm PT
		Live Checkoff with TA (Checkoffs will happen 8/10)	36

Lateness Policy: Slip Days may not be used on any Project 3 deadlines. To accommodate this, your 3A score will be fully clobbered by your 3B score, and we will offer regrade requests on 3A.

Note on Grading

For Summer 2026, we are NOT grading this assignment as it is considered optional. However, we will grade it based on effort to determine whether you receive the recovery points. Make sure to submit this before the Project 3A: World Generation deadline in order to be eligible to receive recovery points. Additionally, if you’d like feedback on your design doc, feel free to ask in lab.

Design

Before getting started, please read the Project 3A: World Generation and Project 3B: Interactivity specs. You won’t be able to begin either task without understanding the BYOW spec first!

Task: Writing Your TDD

We have provided a template for you to use if you’d like. See the Project 3: BYOW Design Template, which is also linked in the assignment below.

Check the Technical Design Document tab for a refresher and an example of a design document

As mentioned earlier, design docs are living documents. You (the designer) might not understand the entire project scope while drafting, and that’s fine. Including a section for questions can help track your thoughts for future iterations.

A “Questions” section is useful for collaboration. Your collaborators may want to understand which assumptions you made or questions you had when designing.

Write a TDD for BYOW and submit it to the Project 3: BYOW Design assignment.

For BYOW, the complexity of your program is not as important.

On the other hand, the data of your program is. What type of data do you expect to save and load?

We may ask to see your design document to help understand your approach. As such, please put effort into this assignment! Grasping project requirements in the design phase will help immensely during the later implementation phases.

Design Tips

We’ve included below a few questions for you to consider while brainstorming your design:

General Questions

• Look through the provided code:
  • Notice what’s already built for you. What may be useful for your implementation?
  • Notice what isn’t. What gaps does your implementation need to fill?
• Where do tasks overlap? Are there opportunities to reuse methods across different cases? Think about opportunities for helper methods.
• Can you find groups of data structures and methods that serve a similar, clearly defined purpose? If so, consider moving them to a separate class. Building abstraction barriers may be helpful for managing code complexity.

World Generation

• What are the core components of each world? Does it makes sense to have a separate class for each component?
• How will you ensure that every generated world is valid?
  • Will you decide on a layout first, validate it, then build the world after?
  • Or, will you gradually generate the world, ensuring that only valid components are built as you go?
• Ultimately, each world is a 2D grid of values, each representing a Tile. What data structures would be helpful for tracking the state of the world on top of this grid? Representing specific aspects of your world with data structures may be helpful for building ambition features later.

Interactivity

• Read through the StdDraw library documentation. This library acts as the bridge between your implementation and what is outputted on screen (e.g. the /tileengine implementation uses library methods to draw to the screen).
  • Can you find methods for drawing on the screen, not specifically for tile drawing?
  • Can you find methods for soliticiting user inputs?
• Rendering video is much like a classic film projector, in that by rapidly rendering images, we can create the illusion of motion. Video games are essentially the same, except that user inputs can alter what’s displayed in the next frame. (Read about common paradigms for implementing video games and graphics engines here)
  • Does your implementation clearly separate the steps of collecting, processing, and displaying the result of user inputs?
• Consider that your computer can compute thousands of instructions each second. If your implementation has real-time elements (i.e. timers, slow-motion movement, NPCs moving at user-like speed, etc.), how can you adjust the speed of your event loop to match real-time?

Ambition Features

• Most importantly, which ambition features are you most excited about building?
• For each feature, determine where it fits within your current abstraction barriers:
  • Does it require fundamental changes to the process of generating and representing worlds?
  • Does it alter the process for collecting user input?
  • Does it change the process for rendering the world state?
• Do any features span multiple domains of this project? If so, consider creating separate classes to contain their complexity.
• How could you structure your core project implementation (world generation and interactivity) to make feature integration seamless?

You aren’t bound to the ambition features you choose to write about within your design doc. That said, certain features(especially primary ones) are better aligned with certain implementation choices in the world generation and interactivity tasks. It’s important to think about this early!

Submission

Submit your design document on gradescope: Project 3: BYOW Design (4 recovery points)

Don’t forget to add your partner to the submission!

The score you receive on Gradescope is your final score for this assignment (assuming you followed the collaboration policy).

A note on grading, we are looking for thoughtfulness and effort. In other words, you do not have to be correct in your design or your complexity analysis, but we expect you to have put in considerable time into designing your approach. As long as you attempt to describe your approach for the components in the rubric, you’ll receive full credit.

For the TDD, we have provided the rubric we’ll be grading submissions on below for your reference.

1. Data (10%): Describes how the data will be used.
2. Data Structures (40%): Describes what data structures will be used with the data.
3. Algorithms (40%): Describes what algorithms will be used with the data structures and data.
4. Complexity (10%): Describes the expected time and space complexity of the program.

This spec was written by Daniel Wang and Ronnie Beggs as a new assignment in Fall 2025. The provided template was created by Kanav Mittal and Stella Kaval in Spring 2025 and edited by Daniel Wang.