Five games made using JavaFX early on in my software development journey. Since Java was my first programming language that I’ve learned, I’ve used Java, more specifically JavaFX , to create multiple games.
The earlier ones started as practice projects and small exercises. The last two I mostly created out of boredom to apply newly learned programming concepts in a fun way. In addition, these games were created when I wasn’t proficient in CSS, hence the inconsistent design.
Tic-Tac-Toe
GitHub Repo @BenJeau/JavaFX-TicTacToe
This was my first game ever and was intrigued at how I could incorporate multiplayer mechanics, locally and over local network. The last part was a bit too ambitious, but I remember getting it somewhat working. Looking at the code, it is arguably one of the worst games I’ve made. Every move was hardcoded in “beautiful” if-else-if statements. Even if this is the case, I don’t mind the code being up since it demonstrates the evolution of my programming skills.
There’s also the choice of playing against the computer, the computer difficulty was as follow:
- * Easy: always making random moves
- * Medium: making either a random move or a smart move (according to an expert algorithm)
- * Expert: always making smart moves (where the computer will always win or tie with you)
Simon Says
GitHub Repo @BenJeau/JavaFX-SimonSays
Created shortly after, this one was way more simple. I simply wanted to create a game that was similar to the classic Simon Says game. The game was simpler than the Tic-Tac-Toe game, but I was still proud of it as it took me less time to create.
Poker
GitHub Repo @BenJeau/JavaFX-Poker
I wanted to create a game that was more complex than the previous ones. I decided to create a poker game, where you can play against the computer or against another player.
It was also my first time creating a multilingual application, although the implementation is pretty naive (with no runtime language change). I’ve decided to create a poker game since the rules are more complex than Tic-Tac-Toe or Simon Says.
Tetris
Github Repo @BenJeau/JavaFX-Tetris
The following two games were a fun way to apply newly acquired programming skills.
It was also the first time where I tried to separate the concerns of the application by splitting the code in related classes. I had attempted a Tetris-like game earlier in my journey, but it was a complete mess and I didn’t know how to properly structure the code.
Sudoku
GitHub Repo @BenJeau/JavaFX-Sudoku
The last game I’ve created with JavaFX was a Sudoku game. This simple game was a bit more complicated than anticipated because of the generation of the board. I was using recursion and backtracking to generate the board, but since I’ve never seen the concept of backtracking before, I had issues with its implementation.
Unfortunately, since I haven’t completed the backtracking part completely, the board generated may not always be playable. As the code to generate a full board was functional, but then removing some numbers to create a playable board was not (the second backtracking part).