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This was my term project for my Graphical User Interfaces course. The assignment was to use swing to create a rubiks cube simulator. The minimum requirement was to just show 1 face at a time, and this could be done by only having 9 blocks on the screen and those blocks could be buttons so in that case no graphics programming would be necessary. Since I have a mild obsession with Rubiks Cubes (my record solve time at the time of posting is 39 seconds 🙂 ) and I was very comfortable with Swing, even before the class, I decided to go all out with this project.

The main area is just a JPanel, however did alot of custom drawing in the JPanel. It also included some math to determine which button was being hovered based on the mouse position. The backend was pretty fun to write. Even though the cube is build up of 26 blocks it was easier to think of it as 54 subfaces. I just had to make sure all those faces were manipulated correctly for each operation. Then for drawing the 27 faces which happened to be on those sides were drawn.

I additionally had several extra mechanics in the sidebar such as as undo button and a move counter. In tournaments a single move is one turning of a face, regardless if it’s a quarter or semi turn. So I accounted for this in my move counter. It even resets the move if you do an eniter turn. It aspect of the sidebar which I’m most happy with is the fact that’s it’s configurable. There are several extra features but you can choose which ones go in the sidebar.

The last thing I’d like to talk about is that you don’t need to use the mouse. Everything is also mapped to keyboard shortcuts. So I guess in theory if one was trying to solve the cube as fast as possible they could do so by just typing a series of commands on the keyboard,

Hercules: The True Story

On July 16, 2015 by apc With 1 Comments - Portfolio Projects

Click Here to find it on Google Play

“>Click Here to find it on Google Play

This was another game I made with Spyros which buildt upon our fighting game engine. This was my favorite of the 3. I liked the theme a lot and I thought that the art looked best in this one. It also had a more neat storyline and we had custom music made for this one which really increased the overall value.

This game was made specifically for the Tizen App Challenge. There was a lot of money in prizes available, and since we already had a fighting game engine and Game Maker recently started supporting Tizen we figured we’d try to submit something. Tizen is a new mobile platform which is designed to be a cheaper version of android. The makers wanted to populate their app library which is why they invested so much in this contest. I think they also influenced yoyogames to implement a tizen module in Game Maker Studio.

On a technical level I also added some new things. The enemies had more dynamic mechanics and your could select your levels from a map of europe which corresponded to the locations of the individual bosses. The game overal was more mobile friendly. You’d traverse through the story line by swiping the slides on the screen and you would also scroll through the map in this manner.

Click Here to find it on Google Play

This a project I made with Spyros Kontis, he found me on YouTube and asked to help develop this game. This was the largest project I’ve worked on at the time and fighting games in particular are a tricky game to develop. That said it got finished and I’m very happy with how it turned out. Throughout the process I learned a lot about organizing my code to make it readable and to also avoid redundancies as much as possible. I started with 8 fighting character objects but through the use of parenting and some clever scripts I managed to get it down to a single parent object.

The political satire game about the greek government, I liked the premise. The beginning includes a Star Wars style scrolling text intro describing the story which is something I’d never done before. Another new thing for me was that it had to have a language selection feature. The 2 languages were Greek and English. Greek is a particularly difficult to implement since it uses a different alphabet. A few months prior to this I made a tutorial about custom fonts. Luckily greek has fewer letters than the English so I was able to create a special “Greek” font which mapped all the ASCII letters to Greek looking letters.

Another major accomplishment was implementing the AI. I did so using a state machine which included a ~12 node system with various connections between the nodes. I’d never made one before and I’m very happy with how the result turned out.