Sample TP3 Proposal

This is a sample TP3 submission for a hypothetical student project, following the sample TP0, TP1, and TP2 proposals. The TP3 proposal has only Section 1. It shows the level of detail expected; your proposal will describe your own project. The course staff expects this project would receive a term project grade of about 80%, assuming all proposals are submitted on time and all interviews receive a score of 1.

Section 1: Summary of progress

• Working: the complete game, about 1,600 lines. Line and bomb gems, including chains; hints; How to Play screen; saved high score.
• Different from proposed: hint outlines pulsed too fast to read at 10 steps; they now alternate every 15 steps.
• Bug fixed: after a reshuffle, special gems stayed in their old cells while their colors moved, because specials wasn’t shuffled with the board. Both lists are now shuffled together as pairs.
• Open questions answered:
  • A special gem at the swapped cell activates and is replaced by the new special gem, so swapping a special gem is never wasted.
  • Chains animate all at once, in the existing 'clearing' phase. A new phase per gem made long chains feel slow.
  • Hints stay random and don’t prefer special gems; preferring them made the game too easy.
• Not finished: color bombs for 5-matches, which were planned only if time allowed.
• Known limitations:
  • If highscore.txt can’t be written (for example, in a read-only folder), the high score is kept only until the game closes.
  • Very long chains can clear most of the board, and their points pop up on top of one another.
• Sources and AI help: no external code or assets. Claude implemented special-gem creation and chain activation from my Algorithms 1 and 2. Its first chain version used recursion, which I didn’t understand well enough to trace, so I had it use my queue-based steps instead. Claude explained how to read and write a text file safely; I wrote the high-score code myself.
• Demo video: Gem Cascade demo (2 min)