Halo Ball

For our final project in ICS 111, the class was tasked to create a game with a partner that utilized some of the features of java and the EZ imageing program we learned about in the class. My partner, Terrence Nguyen, and I decided to take inspiration from a couple games we both enjoyed playing as children. The game’s theme is based on the shooter game, “Halo”, but we based gameplay from a mini-game found in the game, “Pokemon Stadium 2”. The mini-game was called, “Mr. Mime Ball” and had 4 players control a Mr. Mime and block balls from entering their goal, and reflecting it into the other player’s goal.

To keep things simple we made the game end after a single goal is made and the collision detection for the ball would only need to collide with the border of any image’s border. To generate the background we utilized file reading and arrays to read a file containing letters in a pattern and spawn the corresponding images. I was in charge of creating the classes for character movement and movement of the ball. Although difficult for the players, 4 players could play simultaniously using 4 pairs of keys on the keyboard to move in the directions to cover their goal. The ball’s movement was based on random numbers to send the ball in a random direction at first and then change them accordingly when colliding with any image, player or wall.

In this project I gained knowledge about game development and the many caveats that must be accounted for in the development process. I also learned about getting and using user input to properly control characters in simple games. This project helped solidify my understanding of the Java language and has helped me in projects following this.