Gardening Simulator

Caring for virtual plants with virtual consequences

The goal of this application is twofold as follows:

• To create a gardening simulator for botany-enjoyers to garden without the stress of real-world error
• To model the growth of plants mathematically

Given these specifications, the target audience of this project will likely be:

1. Beginners who are interested in getting into gardening
2. Intermediate/Advanced plant-enthusiasts who already take care of houseplants
3. Game players who enjoy idle genres that involve slow, relaxed gameplay

Personally, my own rationale for this project falls under all categories: I've always been interested in houseplants – but I'm a horrible plant-parent (mine always die), and so I usually stick to the tenacious but unimpressive cacti and succulents. Seeing as virtual plants can't really die, I saw the opportunity to practice my gardening skills in a Java environment as an enjoyable way to pass time and improve my mindfulness in regards to taking care of plants. What's more, I've already had an interest in Lindenmayer systems, which use formal grammar to create beautiful, fractal-esque drawings that mimic natural growth. By pursuing this project, I therefore hope to gain a better understanding of mathematical L-systems through their application within a programming environment.

Stories

• As a user, I want to be able to add plants to my garden
• As a user, I want to be able to remove plants from my garden
• As a user, I want to be able to view all plants within my garden
• As a user, I want my plants to grow over time when watered and cared for
• As a user, I want my plants to die if over-watered
• As a user, I want my plants to stop growing once they reach maturity
• As a user, I want to be able to save the state of my garden to a file
• As a user, I want to load a prior garden state from a file and continue playing
• As a user, I want plant growth to have an element of randomness

Phase 4: Task 2

Plant Jojo added to the garden

Plant Lolo added to the garden

Plant Jojo was watered 2 times

Plant Jojo removed from the garden

Plant Lolo died from a lack of water

Phase 4: Task 3

This project has been somewhat of an eye-opening experience for me. I've always been of the jump first think later mentality – but seeing amount of avoidable coupling in my final result has definitely encouraged me to start pre-planning my programs in the future. The cohesion of my program was better than expected, however, with my focus in phase 3 on truncating the larger classes (e.g. GameApp) into its component tools and graphical components paying off in my ease of writing phase 4.

Although I have made some recent changes to this program's design (i.e. removing duplication among the tools by flushing out GameButton), there are still changes I would make given more time, listed below:

• Changing the GameApp class tool fields to a singular list of GameButtons (their superclass) to lower individual coupling

• Currently, the entirety of the plant exists as a singular object. This makes it difficult, however, to add leaves / modify the plants functionality as need be. Representing the plant instead using the composite pattern with branches (composite), leaves, and offshoots (component) would improve this project's cohesion and make the Plant class easier to work with

• Using a singleton pattern for the garden. There is only one garden (the mainGarden) in this project, and duplicate items are not allowed inside it . Having the Garden control this selection (instead of GameApp) would both improve the cohesion of GameApp, and make reasoning about duplication more easily provable

  • In doing so, the need for GameApp and all the tools to know about Plant could be removed – as the instantiation of new Plants would be handled directly through garden (using a new generatePlant() method). This would remove many dependencies, clean up the UML diagram, and make altering the Plant class in the future much simpler.

• Creating a new Garden Manager Class (Gardener) responsible for managing the time components of this project and updating the garden accordingly. Currently this is done in the GameApp, which handles both this and the Jpanels. Creating this new class would improve overall project class cohesion.

Citations:

Seralization JSON methods modelled upon repository https://github.students.cs.ubc.ca/CPSC210/JsonSerializationDemo.git