A nonogram tour of the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway in Minneapolis, MN
link to project: https://github.com/dholmes215/grandrounds/releases/tag/v0.1
- David Holmes (dholmes@dholmes.us)
The linked Wikipedia page "Round" for inspiration included mention of the Grand Rounds, which I was very familiar with, having lived in Minneapolis my whole life and having biked the Grand Rounds trails hundreds of times. I sought a way to take pictures of landmarks around the Grand Rounds and incorporate them into a game that could be made quickly with the FTXUI library and with my current skills, and nonogram puzzles seemed like a viable vehicle for that, though I ended up biting off more than I could chew.
I have only tested on Windows, building with MSVC, running in Windows Terminal. Furthermore the Debug builds are extremely slow, so I recommend Release builds if you actually want to play the game. I hope it works in other environments but sadly I'm out of time to test them. It is not playable at all in terminals that do not support a mouse.
Unfortunately, due largely to poor planning on my part and somewhat unrealistic goals, I didn't actually finish the game to nearly the extent I would have liked. I hoped to have a dozen or so puzzles, all with photographs of locations around the city. It turns out that 1) designing good nonograms is actually kind of hard, and 2) many great photographs do not make good nonograms at all. Since this was supposed to be a C++ Best Practices game jam, I decided not to spend all my limited time designing puzzles and was more than busy just trying to make the game anyways. So I only ended up with two nonograms, only one of which is actually good.
There are no unit tests, and I disabled the sample tests because I was getting weird build errors I had no time to look into. The CodeQL action on GitHub hasn't passed since the first couple days. It started failing due to CMake/Conan issues that were also causing the regular CI builds to fail, and once I fixed those it was failing due to timeouts after six hours. I haven't looked into why.
The code itself is also sort of a mess. I basically just got it working and now it's time for it to be done so I'm calling it done. I'll hopefully clean it up a bit over the next couple days.
In retrospect I should have spent more time figuring out my environment and the FTXUI library before the game jam started, instead of spending the first weekend on that stuff.
In spite of all that, it was very educational. I can see myself using FTXUI for other projects in the future, and I think I'll be better equipped for future game jams, with better planning and time management.