Java Games

How to Play

Due to Applets no longer being supported and the lack of novelty in these games, these games are not available for play.

Preview

About

The Games

Snake - This is the classic snake game where you eat dots to grow larger. I believe it is the first Java game I ever made.

Pong - The classic pong game where you face off against an AI controlled paddle.

Gravity Worm - This type of game can also be called the helicopter game or flappy bird. You control a worm by clicking to ascend and releasing to descend.

Moon Lander - My simple take on the Lunar Lander genre of games. There are only three levels, and the win screen is just the words "You Win" crudely spelled out with terrain.

Tetris - Just regular Tetris.

Pentris - My first novel game, though I don't think I'm the first to come up with this idea. Essentially Tetris, but the pieces have 5 blocks instead of 4. The actual code and UI for the game allow a much greater degree of customization where you can specify what kinds of pieces show up, how many blocks those pieces have (between 1 and 5) and more.

Blue - My first game to break away from the white, grey, black, and red color scheme. This is a Galaga inspired shooter game with a light upgrade system. The graphics were all made using PowerPoint and feature a blue color scheme. I had planned to add sound but couldn't quite figure it out before I got bored of developing it.

Starfield - Not really a video game. This actually started as a test to make 3D rendering system. I found that having the lines approach the user created the classic 'flying through space' effect and added levers to customize the look of it.

History

Java was the first programming language that I learned, and without a good understanding of the language or coding in general, I immediately jumped into game making. These are the first video games that I made and they were originally published on my GeoCities page in the late 2000s. Due to the relative simplicity of the games, they are all showcased on one page.

Development

All of these were made using BlueJ the IDE of champions. Jokes aside, BlueJ is actually a great way to learn to program in Java as it keeps features to a minimum, and its UI makes visualizing relationships between classes very easy.

Applets were somewhat popular in the early days of the internet, but were rarely used for games as flash was available at the same time and more popular. I chose create Applets because I was familiar with Java and was not too concerned about accesibility of the game.

Running the Games in 2024

For those interested in how I even managed to run these games, it is an involved process. All of these games are coded as Java Applets which could be run from web browsers in the 2000s and early 2010s. However, web browsers started dropping support for Applets in 2013 and Java itself removed support for them some years later. Therefore, both an old version of Java and BlueJ are needed to actually run the code.

I use BlueJ 3.1.0 with the JDK 7u75, but probably any combination from that era should work.

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