Question

I’m working on a Monopoly based game with properties, money, cards, etc. I recently ran into a problem when working on the chance card aspect of the game…

I have an array of Strings that say things, ex,”Tax refund; collect $25″ or “You lose money due to stocks; -$100”. Each card does something different, not all of them just deal with money. My question: how can i store these cards to each hold a string with its description but also any action that is involved. For example, card1 has a String and an int value (-25), but on the other hand another card, card2 has a String, an int value(+10) and a property. Sorry if the question is really vague but I don’t know how else to describe it.

Just to clarify:

A card could contain simply the description and a money value. While another card might contain a description, money value and move certain spaces.

Thanks to everyone who gave out awesome ideas so quickly!

Answer 1

If your range of actions is very limited (say, 2 or 3 actions involving money, move squares, etc) then I might use the following class:

class Card {
    // It would be a good practice to not make the following fields
    // public and use getters/setters instead but I've made them this
    // way just for illustration purposes

    public String text;
    public String action;
    public int value;

    Card(String text, String action, int value) {
        this.text = text;
        this.action = action;
        this.value = value;
    }
}

This way (as already pointed out by some other answers), you can use an array of Cards instead of array of Strings. You can then have text in one field, the action in a separate field, and the value associated with that action in a third field. For example, you could have the following cards:

Card lose25 = new Card("You lose $25", "money", -25);
Card move5squares = new Card("Move 5 squares ahead!", "move", 5);

When you’re ‘processing’ the cards, you can do so in the following manner:

...
if (card.action.equals("money") {
    // Update user's money with card.value
} else if (card.action.equals("move") {
    // Update user's position with card.value
} else if (card.action.equals("...") {
    // and so on...
}
...

EDIT:
If the cards can hold more than one action, you can use a HashMap to store actions for that card:

class Card {

    public String text;
    public HashMap<String, Integer> actions;

    Card(String text) {
        this.text = text;
        actions = new HashMap<String, Integer>();
    }

    addAction(String action, int value) {
        actions.put(action, value);
    }
}

A HashMap is a collection that can store key-value pairs. So for a card that has 2 actions, you can use the above code as:

Card aCard = new Card("Lose $25 and move back 3 spaces!");
aCard.addAction("money", -25);
aCard.addAction("move", -3);

Now, when you’re actually processing the cards, you need to check the HashMap for all actions stored in this card. One way to iterate through the HashMap is to do the following:

Card processCard = ...;

for (Map.Entry<String, Integer> entry : processCard.actions.entrySet()) {
    // This loop will get each 'action' and 'value' that you added to
    // the HashSet for this card and process it.

    String action = entry.getKey();
    int value = entry.getValue();

    // Add the earlier 'card processing' code here...

    if (action.equals("money") {
        // Update user's money with value
    } else if (action.equals("move") {
        // Update user's position with value
    } else if (action.equals("...") {
        // and so on...
    }
}