Divide&Doodle

Start of Game
Drawing a Frog!
Finished Notebook (5 players, easy mode)
Finished Sky (5 players, medium mode)
Finished Frog (3 players, medium mode)

Inspiration

We wanted to create a project that combined all of our knowledge in Java. We were inspired by our passion of playing games and drawing so we decided to combine that into a Java game.

What it does

Divide&Doodle is a 2-5 people multiplayer game all on one computer. First, players need to select a difficulty and choose the number of players. Then the game starts. Players take turns, prompted by the computer, on drawing a selected topic. But they have a limited time to draw, so players must work together to create the final image in parts! The game switches players when the drawing freezes and the computer displays the message at the bottom of the screen, then players have a short 5 seconds to switch to the next player.

How we built it

We built this game completely in Java, extending JPanel and implementing MouseListeners. For the UI and frontend of the project, we built a diverse gameDisplay which held many features (such as the timer, topic, buttons, and slider). All elements were changeable and editable from the backend. The backend redrew the canvas every millisecond and and moved the game along according to the time elapsed.

Challenges we ran into

With Java and using JPanel, we got a lot of functionality but we had to sacrifice more aesthetic elements of other drawing classes. So instead of making a cute and aesthetically pleasing user interface, we compensated with a simplistic design that was easy to use. As well, our pixel brush at first was more sporadic and spaced apart with the big canvas, so we expanded the radius of the pixel brush to make it more cohesive and consistent. This also aided to shrink the canvas size, making it more feasible to draw in a short amount of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud of how smoothly the pixel brush drew (most of the time) and being able to complete this hefty project in our time frame.

What we learned

We learned that we should come into this hackathon better prepared with a project idea next year and to try to step out of our comfort zone (i.e. do something else other then Java).