Development Challenge

Pig (Dice game)

The Game Rules

_{taken from here}

• Standard Pig (1 dice)

  • Goal: Reach 100 points

  • Turn: Roll a die repeatedly. Add the roll to a "running total."

  • The "1" Rule: If you roll a 1, your turn ends and you gain zero points for that turn

  • Hold: You may choose to "hold," adding your running total to your score and passing the turn

• Standard Pig (2 dice)

  • Same as 1-dice version, except for "1" rule: If a single 1 is rolled, the player scores nothing and the turn ends. If two 1s are rolled, the player's entire score is lost and the turn ends

• Big Pig

  • Same as 2-dice version, except: If two 1s are rolled, the payer adds 25 to the turn total. If other doubles are rolled, the player adds twice the value of each dice to the turn total.

• Hog

  • Similar as 1-dice version, but with a variable number of dice to roll. If they roll any 1s, they score zero for their turn; otherwise they score the sum of the dice. The target score might be different from 100

Design decisions and assumptions

• The four variants of the game listed in the previous section were chosen to simplify the implementation and demonstrate the flexibility of changing playing variations

• For the design, the Strategy pattern enables the flexibility to choose from different game rules using the IPigVariation interface. The logic is "rule-agnostic"—it simply follows the RollResult instructions provided by the selected variation

• For the PlayerState and GameState records were used for built-in value-based equality and immutability

• To minimize repeated code Global Usings are included

• xUnit was chosen for the unit tests

• To create the project structure, a Domain-driven approach with Separation of concerns was selected to separate the game logic, the rule variations, the user interface and the tests:

  /DevelopmentChallenge
    ├── Pig.Core          # GameState records and GameLogic transformer
    ├── Pig.Variations    # Standard, BigPig, Hog, and Two-Dice logic
    ├── Pig.Console       # UI, InputHandler, and Program loop
    └── Pig.Tests         # xUnit tests for all core logic
  

• The project uses Deterministic Unit Testing. Instead of relying on random numbers, we pass specific dice arrays (e.g., [1, 1]) into the state transformer to verify that the resulting GameState reflects the correct score and active player

• The code was written in C#14 / .NET 10.0.101 to benefit from the latest features and longest support. It could also be run on Windows, Linux and macOS without modification

Setup and running/testing the game

• Prerequisites: .NET 10 SDK

• Installation

  # Clone the repository
  git clone https://github.com/jcesar101/DevelopmentChallenge
  
  # Build the solution
  dotnet build

• Execution

• dotnet run --project Pig.Console/Pig.Console.csproj

• Running tests

  dotnet test