1. Erwin Aguilar, Elisabeth Domond, Jesus Gonzalez, James Laskey, Jose Munoz-Lopez, Reuben Orihuela, Jennifer Villacis
Advised by Professor Yi Chen (Computer Science) and Dunmi Olabi ’17 (Computer Science)
Introduction:
Programming Games in Java
Pomona College
Academy for
Youth
Success
We would like to thank Professor Yi
Chen, our amazing research professor
and mentor. We would also like to
thank Dr. Maria Tucker, Sergio Marin,
and the rest of the PAYS staff and
students, for their limitless support.
Computer games combine animation, sound,
and graphics with some kind of task or
storyline.
Done well, they become addictive (e.g. Candy
Crush, Angry Birds, Don't Tap the White Tile,
Snake, 2048). But once you have the idea, how
hard is it in practice to program a game?
In the course of this research experience we
first learned fundamentals of programming in
Java using the Eclipse IDE and then explored
how this knowledge could be used to
implement
basic versions of computer games such as Pong
and Flappy Birds.
(www.candycrushsaga.com)
What we did:
Understanding and writing code
Clearly specifying desired behavior
Week 1 and 2-Learned basic functions
Class= a functioning part of a project
Method= a command
Variable = name for an object
Line (X1,Y1,X2,Y2, canvas);
FramedRect (x, y, width, height,
canvas);
if-else statements
Weeks 3 and 4
Formed pairs, worked on final project,
and prepared oral presentation
What it means:
• The theme of our summer has been focused around the ideas
and perspectives of the American Dream. Computer
programming has played an immense role in molding
perspectives of the American Dream with its contribution of the
Internet, the most influential form of media today.
• The influence of technology in our world and lives has become
extremely widespread and through a career in Computer
Science, the stereotypical American Dream life with the white
picket fence, 3 kids, waffle house, and a remarkable spouse is
definitely possible.
• Whether its satire or advocacy of the American Dream, a
schema subconsciously formed by the viewer, it can also be
seen as one’s own idea of an American Dream to become a
Computer Engineer.
Frustration (Erwin and Reuben)Pong (Jesus and James) The Adventures of Happy Kim (Elisabeth, Jose, Jennifer)
(www.angrybirds.com)
We decided to create the game of Pong in Java eclipse due to pong being one of the
first games to be programmed using java script.
We began with the idea of recreating “Piano Tiles” or “Don’t Step on the White
Tile.” We decided to use the concept of incorporating Falling Objects. We got our
inspiration from a Lumosity game where the basic idea is to filter useless information
in order to get the answer.
Frustration includes a falling ball with a
random color as well as five randomized
color names “Red, Yellow, Green, Blue,
Pink” and each of these words have a
random font color. We have voice
recordings that say random colors to further
distract the players as well as George
Michael’s “Careless Whisper”. The player
must ignore all of this given information
except for the Font Color and choose that in
order to get the correct answer for the game.
Pressing an incorrect key or being too slow
results in losing the game.
The hardest part of coding this game would be
making this seemingly simple idea into reality;
computers are very picky about how people
input code and putting code in the wrong order
results in several different types of errors.
The original name of the game was Flappy Bird, but we decided to call it
Happy Kim because we wanted to make the game’s recreation our own. We
chose Kim Rojas, a PAYS TA, as our game character because she is a very
animated person. The basic objective of the game is to get the falling object to
jump through tubes. The difficult part of the game is trying to get Kim’s face
to jump just high/low enough to make it through the randomly spaced tubes.
It was difficult to program the “bird” falling object to jump at specific shifts.
In addition, it was difficult to program the motion of the tubes and to generate
random tube heights. At first we tried to get the bird to fall and move to the
right at the same time, but then we figured out that it would be easier to just
make the bird fall and have the tubes going to the left instead.
Flappy Bird was an easy game to play, and the overall design of it looked easy, but as
we created it we were faced with a variety of challenges in getting the game to
actually work. We also learned to have more patience with this type of science
because there were a number of times where we had to redo different codes.
In order to bring the game of pong to
computer coding we had to program two
different java classes, the Pong class and
the MovingPongBall class.
1.Pong Class: Responsible for the
skeleton of the game, we used this class
in order to create the frame of the game
by implementing methods such as “new
FramedRect” for the basketball court
background and “new FilledRect” for the
paddles. This class was also responsible
for controlling the movement of the
paddles with the top controlled by Arrow
Keys and the bottom paddle by the mouse
itself.
2.MovingPongBall Class: Responsible for
controlling the movement of the pong
ball. It maintained control of the direction
of the ball when bouncing off the paddles
with constant use of If-else statements in
the code.
The direction of the ball was difficult to
code as often times the ball would
bounce and head off in a random
direction. The controls of the paddles
were difficult to code due to the
language of the java script.