Creating a basic Rock Paper Scissors game in PHP
Rock-paper-scissors chart (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This tutorial will outline the creation of a very basic game I created a long time ago in PHP for the purpose of learning some basic concepts around inputs/outputs from the command-line, decision trees (nested “if-elseif-else” type statements) and variability in PHP’s presentation layer. I thought I’d dust this one off in particular to emphasize how easy it is to create a basic game and encourage readers to tinker with their own simple game creation.
This is the first part of a four part series. The first part is reading from the command-line if the program is run from a console/terminal (and how to determine this). The next part will show how to convert the same program to work via a browser as well if run from there (and how to detect this). The third part shows how you can extend the game to allow different formats for displaying it (depending on where it was being integrated) via SOAP Web Services. The fourth part shows how to create a basic Java-based desktop application that consumes the SOAP Web Service. Yes you heard right, SOAP not REST, because I created this example over a decade ago just before AJAX, REST and later JSON started taking the development world by storm.
These experiments would shine an important light on the diverse capabilities of PHP for me in my early days of learning the language, some 11-12 years ago, and also demonstrated some of its limitations (i.e. did not realize at the outset that PHP had no GUI system on its own like Java’s AWT or Swing, and that without somewhat obscure 3rd-party C-based frameworks like GTK+, Qt-php, wxWidgets, etc your only choice for interaction is command-line, browser or exposing an API that can be consumed by another programming language).
Inputs
You will be given the selection of any of the following values:
- Rock (also accept “R” or the representative number “0” which looks kinda like a rock)
- Paper (also accept “P” or the representative number “1” which kind of looks like a flat piece of paper)
- Scissors (also accept “S” or the representative number “2” which might require a bit more imagination, but just use your fingers to say “2” and it seems like a good fit as well)
This can be presented to the player and read in to the game via a variety of possible entry methods (i.e. toggling a Radio box, selecting from a single-value dropdown, typing in command-line, or in our case, clicking on an image).
BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.