Q*bert progress

By the way, I haven't made too much progress recently on Q*bert. I'm happy to say that I have been answering a lot of good questions and having productive conversations about algorithms for everything from rendering laser beams to differentiating between collisions with horizontal vs. vertical obstacles constructing AI for moving about a maze.
Good stuff, student-initiated, and what they pay me for! (I suspect that somebody has written Q*bert before....)
Yes, I am just writing Q*bert for two reasons:

1. To keep me occupied a little so that I don't meddle with students during class - otherwise, I start to give unwanted advice and solving problems before the students even understand what the problems are, let alone try to figure them out! (And that's not good teaching.)
2. To model the process of writing the program like the ones they are writing, for which this blog is a help.

I have made a little bit of progress, however. I am midway through writing a function in my main class that will read a file of level data. One line per level. This will determine what colors appear on the screen, the frequency of enemy appearances, the number of colors the cube tops cycle through, and the type of cycle they have. So that's a work in progress.