Nicholas Molica (nicmolica) and Ty Nichols (nichols-t), April 2021
SNARL is an ASCII-based command line game developed between January and April 2021. It can support between 1 and 4 players, who can be playing on a single machine or on multiple machines. It is structured like a dungeon crawler game, with zombies and ghosts to avoid, a key to collect, and a dungeon exit to locate.
Throughout the duration of the project, we used Visual Studio Code as our main development environment and Unix shells as our integration testing environment. With the exception of several very basic Bash scripts, the entire codebase is in Python. We made frequent use of the json and socket modules, as well as other general-use modules.
Ty and I collaborated on the project using the Agile development framework to stay on schedule and deliver features as they were requested. We also performed and were subject to bi-weekly code reviews by our peers to ensure that our code was high quality and up to spec. The overall structure of the project is object-oriented. We wrote it to be highly extensible, so there are many places where there is unused functionality either for the purpose of making code more testable, or for the purpose of making the code easy to add to. This is especially apparent in all places that reference players or enemies (zombies/ghosts), since we wanted to be able to add new types of entities in the future (e.g. players who could be on the bad team). We also took special care to ensure that our code throws nice, helpful errors when something is wrong. This is also largely for the purpose of extensibility, since it helps an unfamiliar developer quickly figure out what functionality they're missing if they're trying to add a new feature.
To run a single player game, open 2 shells. In both shells, navigate to the Snarl/net directory and run the command export PYTHONPATH=$(cd ../../ && pwd)$PYTHONPATH. In one of the shells, run the command python3 snarlServer.py --clients 1 --observe and in the other, run the command python3 snarlClient.py. This will start a playable game in the client shell. The --observe argument allows you to view the entire level from the server's perspective, since the client will have a restricted view. If desired, you can play with adding more clients or adding remote clients. To run a remote client, you can specify the IP and port of the server using the --address and --port command line arguments. These are configurable for both the server and client. If you want to play with hitpoints (recommended), just run git checkout m10-hit-point-system. It's currently on a separate branch because it was not fully implemented by the end of April, but it is definitely playable.
Each game consists of a number of levels (the preloaded games only have 2 or 3). You want to pick up the key and use the exit, all while avoiding ghosts and zombies. To do this, you'll need to explore rooms in each level. You can move around by providing the coordinates of the tile you want to move to. Between your turns, other players, zombies and ghosts will have the opportunity to move, but zombies and ghosts can only move a single tile at a time, while you can move up to 2. Ghosts, however, have the ability to randomly teleport to another room as part of their turn! Thankfully, neither ghosts nor zombies can enter a hallway. Once you've collected the key, head to the exit to progress to the next level or end the game. In the ASCII rendering, a Z represents a zombie, a G represents a ghost, a P is you or another player, K is the key, E is the exit, - is a horizontal wall, | is a vertical wall, and X is an impassible tile. These representations will make more sense when you see what the rendering looks like.