Sam+Hughes'+Submission

This project is an ascii racing-esque game. The player travels around the track, attempting to make it past the obstacles, which move about randomly. Further, as it is supposed to be a car, it cannot go backwards.

It works by first creating a track using variables to hold the finish line element, track element, barrier element, and the player positions. The game begins upon input, and proceeds a step at every arrow-key-press. The board will check for appropriate input, move the car, move the barriers, check for a collision, then repeat.





There were issues uploading my writeup, so below is what I had written:

Sam Hughes COP 2200 C Programming - End-of-Class Writeup. I love computers, usually. I actually love philosophy, always. Contrary to preconception, they do go hand-in-hand. Computers offer this perfect world where the philosophy can always be objectively tested, and that both thrills me to no end and frustrates me likewise. I love that it is impossible to believe something wrong with computers, but often even slightly impure logic is just as innefective as when utterly twisted. In life, I can often get away with logic dilluted just enough to avoid imperative, but not so with computers. It is all or nothing. It is simultaneously a constant delight and infuriation.

I first played around with C when I was 14, working through tutorials on an aged, second-hand computer from a relative. Down in our unfinished basement, I would pore over these pages, having to download them upstairs, and then cart the computer back to the basement. I really did not learn much about C, but I learned something way more important: how to think logically; how to organize my thoughts into task-oriented thinking, dividing the logical operations into neat slices that may then be assembled into a functional whole. I have since had a few programming classes, and I've since spent a few years out of school, yet, having forgotten much, that thought-style has remained with me.

Getting back into programming was a little harder than I expected, but I am glad I did. I was a little foggy at first on what was from Java and what was from C, but I was able to pick it back out, and this class has greatly built on what little I had known previously. My greatest area of struggle was with pointers and data structures. In Java, I had learned some behaviours regarding data structures that were wildly counter-productive and confusing, as its classes were completely different from C structs. Yet, despite the hours I've spent bashing my head against a wall, it was all exhilaration for the sake of the learning; my philosophy was being purified into something useful and effective.

Having prior experience, I am a little atypical, but if I were to give myself advice prior to beginning the class, it would have been to ask more questions. Especially in regards to my experience of hobbying from online tutorials, I am accustomed to working on my own, bashing my head against problems until they are solved. In regards to my first project, I think that more questions would have revealed better solutions, which would have saved me time, and maybe the project too. But, I did feel a little distanced from my classmates, as though to ask these questions would just be grandstanding or showing off my learning, and so I failed to receive good. Yet, going forward, I intend to ask more questions, to risk appearing as an arrogant ass for the sake of emerging a better thinker.