Memory

Making a fun, terminal, memory card game (also called Concentration) Github here: [https://github.com/akashdeepdeb/kpcb-memory]

Instructions

Running the game is fairly straightforward. Perform the following steps in the current directory:

    $ chmod +x memory.sh
    $ ./memory.sh

You should get the following terminal output, waiting for a response:

    ===== WELCOME TO THE MEMORY GAME HUMANS AND ROBOTS =====
    How many players would like to play memory today?
    Enter 1 to play with the computer or >2 to play with friends! 

This game can be multiplayer or single player (play with computer - which works like a FIFO Cache to preserve memory just like another player would)

Follow the instructions, and players will have to choose a location to flip a card. The format of a location is simply {a-i}{1-6}, analogous to a chess-board algebraic notation.

To see how the game functions, go to file printgame.py and change line 14 from if False: to if True:

Rules

The object of this game is to find as many pairs of cards with the same rank. There are only 2 pairs of cards with the same rank which covers all suits.

Rules are the same as the standard game. If a player, successfully finds a match, they receive 10 points on top of their current score. If the match is unsuccessful, the next player gets to move.

Design choice description

The game's organization is fairly flat and modular design with the use of additional class objects and other embedded data structures like the use of a FIFO Cache (instead of an LRU Cache).

• The game is set in main.py which calls on gameplay.py which contains all the main functions for the multiplyer version of this game.
• gameplay.py calls on print functions provided in printgame.py which prints the current_board set up.
• A Card class has been used to define all 54 cards as card objects. The printing functions utilize this data structure to print the board in a user-friendly manner.
• computer.py is essentially a FIFO Cache that stores card information that it reads while playing with the opposite user. The algorithm this model uses is as follows:

  cache size depends on user level [capacity = 3*level]
  select first card randomly from the set
  for second card, look through cache
  if match:
     print both
     delete second card entry from cache
  if no match:
     select second car randomly from the set
     if match:
         print both
     if no match:
         append both to the cache and pop if overflow occurs
  

• utils.py has been used for utility functions that other files have commonly called. It makes more sense to make a general function for utility tools so all other classes and objects can import one file for such methods.

Tooling

Python 3.6.5 has been used for this project. I chose it because I use it most frequently and easier to read code if codebase is large. Choices were: Scala, Python, C++ and Python was the clear winner . Additional python libraries used for util operations: os, time, sys, random, subprocess

Comments and Feedback

If you have any questions or feedback for me on this game, feel free to email me at deb2 at illinois dot edu :)