Programming Contest

We are pleased to be able to hold this year’s programming competition. For this, we have developed the game TerraTactician Expandoria.

The task is to develop a bot and successfully participate in the programming competition with it. There are two parts: the admission test (compulsory) and the competition (automatic). Here is an overview of the parts:

Exam Admission

As part of the exam admission, you have to develop a bot that is able to reach round 5 in at least two of the levels we use to test it in Challenge mode.

We would recommend reading our Bot-Development Getting Started guide.
You can also find a description of the Challenge Mode and of all available Tiles on our website.
You can also work through our Quests to familiarize yourself with the API function calls.

If you want you can test your bot on our two publicly known seeds: AuD, TTE.
To make sure that your bot can perform well in other seeds, we would also recommend testing with multiple random seeds. (Whenever you start the game without manually setting the seed, a random seed will be generated.)

You can upload your bot using the submission site.
If you want to make changes to the bot, you can simply resubmit it.

You are not allowed to resubmit the same bot that someone else wrote.
If we detect plagiarism, your submission is marked as invalid.
It is best not to share your code with others, to avoid being disqualified.

Programming Contest

Once your bot meets the exam admission requirements, it will automatically take part in the programming contest.

Your goal is to develop a bot that can collect as many resources as possible and survive as many rounds as possible.

After simulating your submission, we automatically calculate and upload your score to our scoreboard, which allows you to compare your progress with yourr peers.

At the end of the contest, roughly the top 10 % enter the final, where they are simulated on about 1000 seeds.

The first three will receive a prize during the awards ceremony.

Creative Competition

You can also take part in our Creative Competiton, where you can give free rein to your ideas.
You can also win one of the three smaller prices.

The Creative Competition isn’t relevant for the exam admission, so you should probably focus on the normal Challenge part first.

Here are a couple of ideas for possible submissions:

• Develop a bot for the Creative Mode (i.e., implement a custom gamemode, render images on the hexagon grid, …). You can use the ExampleCreativeBot.java as a starting point.
• Develop a special Challenge bot (i.e., using a different programming language or an interesting way to achieve it in Java)
• Come up with your own ideas

If you want to contribute something to the game itself (like assets or code), please reach out to us beforehand to reduce duplicate effort.

You can submit your creative contest entry from the Algorithms and Data Structures Creative Competition task.
If you developed a Java bot, you can place your code into the MyCreativeBot.java file and add a short description of how to use your bot and which versions of the game you tested in the markdown file.
If you didn’t develop a Java bot, you can leave the Java file empty and place setup instructions in the markdown file. You should also link to the source of your submission, for example, the OVGU Cloud. Remember to set your upload to be private to prevent others from stealing your submission.