teaching machines

CS491 – Final Project Design Document – Cricket ScoreIt

November 14, 2011 by . Filed under cs491 mobile, fall 2011, postmortems.

For the final project I wanted to do two things.  One, I wanted to create an app that I would actually use a lot and two, create something that was visually appealing and didn’t just contain the built in controls.  My room mates and I play the dart game cricket very often and the worst part about it is keeping score.  We also like to keep track of who beats who so to determine who is the all-time best player in the house.  This led me to propose creating a cricket scoring app that would keep score/marks, but could also keep track of a players specific win/loss record overall and against specific players.

The app would start off with a main activity that would offer the user to start a new game, load an unfinished game, or see the stats of a specific player.  If new game is selected it would take the player to a new game activity where the type of cricket being played as well as the number of players and actual players playing the game.  The players will be selected from a existing database table of players and will also offer to create a new player.  Once all decision have been inputed a start button can be clicked to start the game.

One nice feature I thought should exist is the ability to save a games current existing status.  If the load game button is pressed on the main menu it will take the user to a list view that will show the date of a saved game as well as the players involved and whose turn it is (name highlighted or starred).  Once the list item is clicked, it will take the user to the game play activity.

The stats button on the main screen will take the user to the stats activity which has a player drop down bar.  Once a name has been selected it will show that players overall record as well as their individual record against other players in the database.

Finally, we have the game play activity.  This will feature the players name on either side of the scoring column.  After a player has thrown their darts, they can press the number down the central column corresponding to how many of that target they hit.  If they are playing a scoring game, it will add to the players score accordingly.  A player can undo previously added marks by pressing the undo button which will in order remove the marks as they were added (like Word’s undo command).  After a players is done placing marks, they can hit the Score It button and the game will move to the next players turn.

Besides all the functionality working, I would also like to make all the screen’s look graphically appealing and have a dart theme (chalkboard/green felt).  There will be a fair amount of UI work as well as database implementation in this project so their in lies the challenge.