The game involves implementing in Java, a board game called IQ-Fit made by the games developer SmartGames.
The game is a puzzle. The object of the game is to place ten plastic pieces on a board so that the pieces fill the board perfectly, with no overlaps and no gaps. The player starts by selecting a challenge which will have some number of pieces already placed. Their task is to place all remaining pieces. Broadly, the more pieces that are placed, the smaller the set of remaining options for the player, and therefore the easier it is to complete the puzzle. The challenge is made interesting by the complex three-dimensional shapes of the plastic pieces.
A completed game:
To help you visualize the game, we have provided a paper version, which you can cut out.
A game starts by choosing a challenge which specifies in what positions certain puzzle pieces must be placed. The puzzle pieces that are pre-placed by the challenge at the start of the game cannot be moved by the player until the game is ended.
Here is the starting challenge for the game above:
In the challenge above, the lime (L), sky blue (S), indigo (I), and green (G) pieces are placed as part of the challenge. They can't be moved. You can see that much of the board is unfilled (grey holes). The player's task is to place the remaining six pieces in such a way that all of the board is covered perfectly, which means no gaps and no overlaps.
The game comes with five difficulty levels: starter, junior, expert, master, and wizard, and offers 24 challenges at each level, for a total of 120 prescribed challenges. These challenges are provided for you in the Solutions class.
Each challenge has just one solution.
The following sequence shows one possible progression of a solution to the game above (note that the order in which the pieces are played is not important; this is just one possible sequence of moves).
The game is played on a board comprised of 50 locations arranged in a 10x5 grid.
In the real-world game, each location consists of a
circular indent into which a piece may fit. We refer to the placement of
pieces in terms of their upper left corner when a bounding box is placed around them.
In our game, locations are
encoded as two digits, the first one identifying the column from 0
to 9, followed by another identifying the row from 0 to 4.
In the example illustrated below we show how the location of pieces on the board is encoded. Notice that we identify each piece by the location of the upper-left corner of its bounding box (a rectangular box drawn around the piece).
For example, in the game above, the lime piece (lower-left, lime-green in color) is
in position 02 (column 0, row 2), the sky-blue piece (bottom center-left) is
in position 23 (column 2, row 3), the indigo piece (purple, bottom center-right)
is in position 63 (column 6, row 3), and the green piece (green, right) is in
position 82 (column 8, row 2). Notice how the bounding box is necessary
to identify the location of the sky-blue piece since the piece itself does not cover
location 23, but that is the top left corner of its bounding box. Likewise for the
green piece, which does not cover 82, but that is the top left corner of its bounding box.
For the lime-green and indigo pieces the top-left corner of the piece is the
same as the top-left corner of its bounding box.
The game comprises 10 playing shapes, each of a distinct color (blue, green, indigo, lime-green, navy-blue, orange, pink, red, sky-blue, and yellow).
Each piece is 3-dimensional. Note that in your assignment, your game will be on a screen (just like this description), so will only view each piece from a two-dimensional perspective.
You should study the picture below carefully. The lime-green, navy-blue, and red pieces have not been placed, revealing their three dimensional shape.
Each piece can be thought of in terms of a spine comprising either three (green, indigo, lime-green, navy) or four (blue, orange, pink, red, sky-blue, and yellow) spheres in a straight line.
Each piece has three additional spheres that protrude from the spine, two in one plane, and one in the other. Thus, when laid flat on a table and viewed from above, they will either have a single protrusion sticking out from the spine (blue and red in the photo), or a double protrusion (lime-green). You can see these clearly in the diagram below.
When a piece is placed on the board, it must be placed with either the single or double protrusion pointing downwards into the holes in the board. Thus in the photo above, each of the 7 pieces placed on the board has no protrusions pointing upwards. When a player places a piece, they can have either the double protrusion pointing down, into the board, or the single protrusion pointing down into the board. In the photo above, the pink, orange, and sky-blue pieces each have their single protrusion visible, which means they were all placed with the double protrusion pointing downwards, into the board. On the other hand, the blue, green, indigo and yellow pieces all have their double protrusion visible, which means they have been placed with their single protrusion pointing downwards into the board.
Since each piece may be placed in one of four 90-degree rotations (north, east, south, west), and in two flips (single protrusion visible or double protrusion visible), each piece has eight possible ways it can be placed on the board.
The diagram below illustrates all ten pieces and their eight possible orientations. The first four
columns show each piece its single protrusion visible with four 90-degree rotations, while the last four columns
show each piece with its double protrusion visible with four 90-degree rotations. When we encode pieces in
this assignment, we use lower case letters (e.g. b) to encode a piece in its
single protrusion orientation (left half of the diagram), and we use upper case letters
(e.g. B to encode a piece its double protrusion orientation (right half of the diagram).
In the game below, you can see that lime was placed in the L flip (double protrusion) and the W
orientation (west), sky-blue was placed in the s flip (single protrusion) and S orientation
(south), etc.
For a piece placement to be valid, the following must be true:
- All of the visible spheres in the piece must be placed above board locations (no part of a piece may be off the board).
- All of the visible spheres in the piece must be placed on vacant board locations (pieces may not overlap).