<p>I am very interested in computer science. I love to write programs, and over the summer I've studied Java and written a few games. Can I put things like this on a CD to send along with my application, and how much of a factor will it be?</p>
<p>You may send us anything, and if you send a CD we'll probably look at it, as long as the loading is easy (typing out a URL will work too, and I recommend this instead).</p>
<p>We will consider it, but to make an impact it would have to be impressive. Everybody who applies to Caltech could write a game with some effort, so if you want it to make an impact, it needs to impress, say, a sophomore CS major (as in, "it's not obvious exactly how to do that, some cleverness was involved here"). If it's all totally standard cloning of stuff that's out there, then it probably would be pretty unimpressive.</p>
<p>If you have have the time, could you rate this for me? (Its a Java Applet so you will need JVM)</p>
<p>I am not sure how good this is. You will probably win against the computer more often than lose on hard (personally, I win around 75% of the time).
Also, I originally developed it as an application and not an applet. As a result, you might need to scroll around and the online version might have a few bugs. And since I have a slow connection (My family and I are still in the dial-up age) some features such as sound were left out.</p>
<p>Thanks for your time.</p>
<p>Won't load. I'll defer to SteelPangolin on this one. Monsieur Steel?</p>
<p>I won (which makes me feel good), but I couldn't turn my ships and the computer ships went in both directions. What did I not do?</p>
<p>What're we supposed to look for?</p>
<p>It doesn't seem that impressive. Actually, what would be cool is if you could run the AI as both players and give us a probability of a win given both player's starting boards (and ideally, I want to find the probability of winning given just my starting board). Then, I want to know the best board configurations (and if this changes when the board dimension changes).</p>
<p>Works for me. Ben, you may not have Java installed.</p>
<p>It's an implementation of Battleship. No obvious bugs, but nothing special. It won't do anything either way for you, because Battleship is a pretty brain-dead game. Games that have unique gameplay or that require the creator to overcome significant challenges in graphics, physics, AI, or other areas are what I'd want to see. If you spent more time thinking about a part of the game than looking at API documentation, you're probably on the right track.</p>
<p>examples of games that were or could be built by one guy that involve interesting problems:
<a href="http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=988%5B/url%5D">http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=988</a>
<a href="http://www.harveycartel.org/metanet/n.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.harveycartel.org/metanet/n.html</a>
<a href="http://www.classicgaming.com/scorch/%5B/url%5D">http://www.classicgaming.com/scorch/</a>
<a href="http://zara.verge-rpg.com/games.htm%5B/url%5D">http://zara.verge-rpg.com/games.htm</a> (Shippu)</p>
<p>You can turn you ships by pressing the right mouse button and then moving the ship to a new position.</p>
<p>I did spent a while looking at the API because I didn't know how to include some features, like sound. But I did spent a chunk of time (and around 300 lines) developing the computer AI.</p>
<p>Thanks for your time. I might try to make a simple chess or poker game next.</p>