About

Terminal Monopoly was a project I created during my winter break after my first semester. This project was created for Ohio University’s ACM Club’s break long project competition. This project earned me 2nd place in the underclassmen division. It has nearly all Monopoly features including buying/selling properties, upgrading properties, and Jail. There is also an interactive board interface in the terminal to easily keep track of the game.

Issues and Solutions

There were a few problems I had to figure out while writing this code. The biggest one was how I would display the board to the terminal in an interactive manner. I eventually created a system that would render the board as ASCII characters and refresh for every mood. This created a “live” feel to the game as you could see the piece move across the entire board. I was able to create some unique solutions to create a cohesive playing environment.

This was the first time I had to create an application from scratch that there was no clear-cut way of doing it. There were many growing pains in this project. But, I learned a lot and felt like it did a good job of preparing me for my first internship I had.

What did I Learn?

I learned a lot during this project like how to break up and modularize pieces of code and functionality. I also learned how to take big, abstract ideas and to break them down into smaller problems to solve one at a time.

There’s also plenty I learned NOT to do from this project. One such thing is “leaving the documentation for the end”. Seriously, I can’t even understand exactly what I was thinking when I was writing that code… so if you are able to- I’m impressed (I’m half joking, I could figure it out with enough time but had I wrote documentation at the time of writing it, then it would be much easier).