Eclipse IDE Projects
"So I can make games on this?"
"Yea, probably."
"Cool... Hey, where do I even type anything?"
What Is This?
In my Grade 11 computer science class, my teacher introduced his class to an integrated development environment (IDE for short) for Java called Eclipse. With this program, we would learn Java and complete assignments given to us, and eventually use it to work on our final project. After Grade 11, I kept using it in my free time to better my Java skills even further as well as to become more familiar with Eclipse. By Grade 12 I was very fluent in Java, taking on assignments with even more creativity than last time. We did a recap of what we had learned last year, and groups in our class were each assigned a chapter from our textbook to make a presentation on. A friend and I were given Chapter 11: GUIs and Event-Driven Programming, focusing on the production of programs that use graphical interfaces.
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Over the course of a month, I had tons of fun learning to develop programs (and games) with a Java library dedicated to GUIs called Swing.
One of our assignments involving Swing was to choose a basic game to recreate. We chose Tetris. It wasn't hard, but it wasn't too simple either. Here is a code sample displayed in the Eclipse editor that I wrote which checks if a row is filled every time a new piece is set down.
This is what the final recreation looks like in action!
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Neither I nor my partner did much research into the specific mechanics of Tetris, so this is certainly not the most accurate recreation. However, it still works somewhat similarly to the original game. The dimensions of the tower are customizeable, meaning you can play a game where filling a single line would take hours on end, or wait a day for a single piece to fall. The way the pieces are coded makes it easy to build your own pieces to stack in the tower, allowing for absolutely chaotic and instantaneous modification of the game.
On my own time, I decided to further practice using the Swing library by recreating the classic Snake game. This code snippet describes all the main mechanics of Snake such as movement, point collection, apple placement and game-ending conditions.
Here's what the Snake recreation looks like. Just like with Tetris, you can resize the map to any dimensions you like. The game uses both your keyboard and UI buttons to obtain user input and change the snake's direction. If you trigger a game over by hitting yourself or a wall, a small animation plays where your snake turns gray pixel by pixel starting at the head and ending at the tail.
