Breakout : Complete Implementation

Complex systems can be viewed either by focusing upon things or processes; there are compelling reasons for applying object-oriented decomposition, in which we view the world as a meaningful collection of objects that collaborate to achieve some higher level behavior. — Grady Booch

Build your planned Breakout game. Focus on just the basics of OpenJFX (just shapes, animation, and managing stages) and practicing the process of using Git (just add, commit, and push). Future assignments will cover more of these technologies so don't get carried away this week.

Along the way, after you get parts of your project working, practice taking some time to refactor your code (making multiple drafts to make sure you understand how every line works together and to get past the ugliness left over from all the things you tried just to "make it work") to practice thinking about code beyond just its functionality. As a reminder, you are expected to consistently adhere to DESIGN-01 through DESIGN-06: 

• Multiple Classes
• Meaningful Names
• Named Constants
• Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY)
• Interact Through Methods
• Consistent Code Formatting

While you may not achieve this on the first project, meeting these Design Goals should make it easier to write code for the variations.

Advice

• Start early — you cannot do this in a night
• Get help — UTAs are holding Office Hours this week to answer technical questions about OpenJFX, GIT, and Java
• Start keeping notes for your Project Analysis Journal about the decisions you make
• Follow the directions to learn this course's processes — you may get an email from us if we cannot find your work or it is not in proper formats (code and design feedback will be given after the assignment is due)
• Reasonable effort on this project will not negatively impact your final grade and will help you gauge your preparedness for this course

GIT

In this course, unlike the experience most of you will likely have, we want you to think about managing programming projects differently:

• Always start with an issue
• It's all connected in Gitlab

GIT, in general, and Gitlab specifically, provide a lot of support to help you manage your project with their Issue Board.

As part of the project requirements, you will be expected to create many, small, purposeful commits, rather than just one or two large "kitchen sink" or "submit-only" commits.

Use this project to practice using GIT more effectively on your own before working in a team.

As a reminder, your final submission is the last commit on the main branch of the provided breakout_NETID project hosted in the course's Gitlab group before 3:08am in the morning.

README

In addition to organizing your code according to the Submission Guidelines and documenting your code, complete your README file — especially documenting your cheat keys, assumptions, and attributing any images or resources you used.

A README file is common for most software projects that helps new developers get started with the project.

Resources

• Representing Vectors and Motion in Animation from The Nature of Code by Daniel Shiffman
• Different ways of reading a text file in Java by Pankaj Kumar
• Smartly Load your Resources by Vladimir Roubtsov (focus on the first part, later projects will use Properties)
• Writing Javadoc comments and generating Javadoc with IntelliJ