Mancala was one of the final projects for my AP Computer Science course during my junior year of High School in 2015. The project lasted for one week and was an exciting experience that tested my programming, art, collaboration, and deadline management skills. I worked in a team with three others and together we produced a fully playable version of Mancala.

Contribution

For this project, I focused on the architecture of the game code. I also worked on the actual gameplay code, menu system, image scaling code, and UI system. In addition to programming, I also created all of the artwork you see in the game, using Flash CS6.

Pictures

What I Would Do Differently

The program was written in Java, with Swing, over the span of one week as my AP Computer Science course was taught in Java. If I were to rewrite this program from scratch, I would use my knowledge of OpenGL with C++, Unity with C#, or LWJGL with Java to create a more efficient and fluid gameplay experience.

Currently, all rendering is done on the CPU, but if I were to recreate this project, I would draw the images on the GPU instead to significantly increase performance!

Playable Download

If you would like to download and play Mancala for yourself, click here.

GitHub

If you’re interested in the development process of Mancala, check out the Github Repository—my Github is Andy608.