CPPND: Capstone Snake Game

This game was developed from a starter repo for the Capstone project in the Udacity C++ Nanodegree Program. The code for this repo was inspired by this excellent StackOverflow post and set of responses.

Basic game functionality has been extended as follows:

• The actual game is wrapped in a menu loop. Upon running the executable, a menu is shown in the terminal. The user then selects the desired menu option.

• Existing game mode (i.e. one blue-headed user-controlled snake) is deemed as Simple game mode. Now there is also an Advanced game mode, where the user-controlled snake and one magenta-headed autonomous snake go after the same food. The autonomous snake is driven using the A* algorithm, and avoids moving over board edges.

• The game keeps track of top 10 high scores regardless of game mode (i.e. both modes share the same high score data).

Dependencies for Running Locally

• cmake >= 3.7
  • All OSes: click here for installation instructions
• make >= 4.1 (Linux, Mac), 3.81 (Windows)
  • Linux: make is installed by default on most Linux distros
  • Mac: install Xcode command line tools to get make
  • Windows: Click here for installation instructions
• SDL2 >= 2.0
  • All installation instructions can be found here

  Note that for Linux, an apt or apt-get installation is preferred to building from source.

• gcc/g++ >= 5.4
  • Linux: gcc / g++ is installed by default on most Linux distros
  • Mac: same deal as make - install Xcode command line tools
  • Windows: recommend using MinGW

Basic Build Instructions

1. Clone this repo.
2. Make a build directory in the top level directory: mkdir build && cd build
3. Compile: cmake .. && make
4. Run it: ./SnakeGame.

Program code highlights

This project uses multiple modern C++ features and paradigms:

• Reading and writing data from an external file.
• Using data structures such as arrays and vectors, as well as constant variables and constant function parameters.
• Function overloading with different signatures for the same function name.
• Inheritance hierarchies with virtual base class member function overriding and runtime polymorphism.
• Function templates.
• Passing variables by references (example 1, example2).
• Freeing up unmanaged dynamically allocated memory using a destructor.
• Using std::move as one aspect of move semantics.
• Smart pointers and RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization) pattern.
• Multithreading.
• Promise/future pattern.

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