The Circle of Life Game — Alexandra Palermo

How It Plays

A choice-driven console RPG

Character Select — Five lion characters (Apollo, Mane, Elsa, Zuri, Roary), loaded in from characters.txt at runtime, each starting with different Strength, Stamina, and Wisdom.
Two Paths — Cub Training gets you a stat boost and an advisor pick right away, but costs 5,000 Pride Points. Going straight to Pride Lands is the opposite: points now, weaker stats.
Five Advisors — Rafiki, Nala, Sarabi, Zazu, and Sarafina, each with their own ability. You pick or swap whenever you land on a Pink tile.
Tile Events — Every color does something real: Blue's a stat bonus plus an extra turn, Brown/Red knock you backward, and Purple throws an actual CS riddle at you from riddles.txt for a shot at ±Wisdom.
Leadership → Pride Points — At the finish line, your Strength/Stamina/Wisdom convert into a final Pride Points score. Higher total wins, and it gets logged to overallGameResults.txt.

Seeing It Run

A real playthrough

Built exactly per the project's own readme.txt (g++ -std=c++17 gamedriver2.cpp Player.cpp Tile.cpp Board.cpp). Character select, path choice, and tile events all pulling from the real data files:

Character Select

~~~~ Welcome to the Circle of Life Game, Lion King Edition ~~~~
Simba: Choose your character by entering the number at the end of your desired characters line.

playerName|age|strength|stamina|wisdom|pridePoints
Apollo|5|500|500|1000|20000
Mane|8|900|600|600|20000
Elsa|12|900|700|500|20000
Zuri|7|600|500|900|20000
Roary|18|1000|500|500|20000

Tile Events in Action

You rolled a 6
Simba moves to position: 6
Desert storm sweeps through the territory
Your Pride Points went from 25000 to 24500.

You rolled a 4
Nia moves to position: 4
Oh no! You've stumbled into the Graveyard. Move back 10 tiles, -100 Stamina/Strength/Wisdom.

You rolled a 6
Simba moves to position: 20
You've been captured by Hyenas! Dragged back to position 14, -300 Stamina.

You rolled a 2
Nia moves to position: 16
Guided by a friendly herd of elephants — Pride Points: 24300 → 25000!

The Actual Board Class

Real terminal render of Simba's board at the start: a grey start tile and a mix of green, blue, pink, brown, red, and purple tiles. — Rendered in real 24-bit terminal color — the starting layout.

Real terminal render of Simba's board after three moves, with the player marker now on a green tile at position 15. — The same board after three moves — marker now at position 15.

Reflection

Challenges & what I learned

This was a solo project for my data structures course, so everything below is just stuff I ran into and figured out on my own. A few things that stood out:

Parsing Pipe-Delimited Data — Characters, advisors, riddles, and random events all live in flat text files, parsed at runtime with a hand-written split() instead of a library.
Branching Game State — The two path choices (Cub Training vs. Pride Lands) mutate a player's stats differently and swap in a different pre-generated board template, so the two playthroughs actually feel distinct from each other.
Tile Dispatch by Color — Each of the six tile colors routes to its own event function (oasis, counsel, hyena, graveyard, riddle, random), which keeps the event logic out of the main game loop.
Leadership → Pride Points — Designing a conversion formula that actually rewards a full run's accumulated Strength/Stamina/Wisdom, instead of just tallying up raw points, took more trial and error than I expected.