SoK Final Report – Theme Designing for Pairs

Theme designing for pairs is my Season of KDE project, mentored by Heena Mahour. In this project i created new themes for KDE-Edu project “Game Pairs”. In SoK period I created the following themes:

• Fruits
• Vegetables
• Nature
• Stationery
• Leaf Structures

Here are some screen shots of these themes in Pairs:

Fruits Theme

Vegetable Theme

Nature Theme

Stationery Theme

Leaf Structures Theme

These themes will work in following game modes in “Pairs”

• Pairs
• Relations
• Logic
• Words

The most challenging part of my project is to first build and run the program. It took some time and help from KDE community to figure out issues regarding my configuration and have “Pairs” up and running in my machine.

Next step was to understand how a new theme should be added by going through the project. My mentor allowed me to do this myself rather than stating out the ways of how to do it. Adding a theme is not only about creating images and add them. It is about connecting these images to the program as well. In “Pairs” a theme is consist of set of images and a “.game” file. The “.game” file is written in xml and contain information about the images. Following is the step by step process to create and have your theme running in “Pairs”:

1. Download KDE Pairs
2. Extract and follow the steps in README to  build the program
3. Run “Pairs” (After you have built and install “Pairs” you can run it by simply typing “pairs” in the terminal)
4. When you have “Pairs” up and running, you can start creating svg images. (To create svg images, you can use software like inkscape)
5. Create a folder in the “themes” folder in “Pairs” and add the svg images to that folder.
6. Create a xml file “your_theme.game” and edit it following a .game file of a previous theme.
7. Update the CMakeLists.txt file and add the following line “create_theme(your_theme)”
8. Built and run pairs again and you will see your theme with other themes.

Another task of my project is improving documentation in KDE pairs. The user documentation for “https://userbase.kde.org/Pairs“. I even created a techbase wiki page for pairs such that other contributors can contribute to the documentation of pairs in technical side.

A very big thank you should go to my mentor Heena Mahour without whom this project will never be successful. Further more, I would like to thank KDE community who helped me through mailing list when I have issues regarding the project. Last but not least I would like to thank to the KDE SoK organizers for providing this amazing experience. I am looking forward to contribute to KDE even after this is finished.