JawBreaker The Game

The new web page for Jawbreaker can now be found at http://www.houseofhawkins.com/projects/java_jawbreaker/index.php. This page is now only here for historial purposes. All the scores are still on the new site, and I hope the new page looks fresher than this one. Thank you for playing.

The newest add on is the moving ball you can add at the top of the screen. It is located in the Menu bar.

There is now Version 2 beta available for testing. It has the same back end but the graphics are all new and improved, I hope you like it continue to play Jawbreaker. To play beta click here, there is no moving ball yet but the rest is working

Jawbreaker is a java applet game, this is my first attempt at making an applet. It is a game about removing groups of balls, there are different colour balls. You can remove adjoining balls that are of the same colour. The larger the group of balls the larger the score received. These balls get removed and you keep going till you can not match any sets or run out of balls.

There are now Four main types of games available:

  3. Jawbreaker - Continous
  4. Jawbreaker - MegaShift

Each game can have a moving ball that drops into the game when a play makes a move. This doubles the number of games available to play.

There are 8 Classes. the Main class that controls all the start up, loading of images and windows:

The class that deals with the core of the game, the way the game looks, feels and is controlled, this is an abstract class:

The Button class is a representation of each button, with its X and Y coordinates colour icon image and the JButton its self

There are 4 classes are the way each game type type plays, they are extentions of the jawbreaker class:

The last of the classes is the MoveBall class. It is the class that controls the moving ball at the top of the screen. It runs in its own thread, which is safely started and stopped when needed by the jawbreaker class.

If anyone has any suggestions about my code, design of the game or improvements to it please do drop me a line here or visit the forum.

This project was started off as an idea for a final year project at uni. To make the game, then make an AI player to see if it could play better than the average human. It turns out to be too easy in the respect that there is not enough strategy to the game but as i had already started the game i thought id would finish this bit off... Not that i tried the AI :p

I had layed out a rough game life cycle and designed a high level design for the methods that the game would need to function.
The basic game play is as follows: When you select a ball, if it has another ball of the same colour directly above, below, to the left or right then they become a group of balls. If that group is pressed again then those balls are removed from the screen. If when these balls are removed it creates a fully blank line in the middle of the screen, all the balls to the left of that are moved across to fill it. This means there will never be two groups of balls on the screen seperated by space.

Standard is the simple game. when a group of balls are removed all the balls above them fall down to fill that space.

Shifter also drops the balls down when a group is removed, then it moves all balls as far as it can to the right on that line. This has the affect of moving all blank spaces to the left had side of each line. NO ball will move to a different line after they have dropped down.

Continous is almost the same as Standard. The difference is that when a FULLY blank line on the right hand side appears it is filled with a new line of balls. This line is a random number of balls, from 1 to the size of the line. The ball colours are also random.

MegaShift is like Shifter and Continous combined. The balls drop down, if there is a space for a new line they get put in and all balls get shifted to the right.