Capstone Project: Recycle Wave

Lead Designer & Developer: Daniel Cheng

Document last revised: 8/22/2025

Program purpose:

A game with a character that moves up and down in a wave pattern. Your goal is to not hit the sides, or you lose the game. The environmental idea is to have a plastic bottle and a tree or coral, while you try to move the bottle into the recycling bin without hitting the coral or the fish.

Target user profile:

Children or adults of all ages.

Instructions:

1. Press the run button (if you are running in the Java IDE)
2. It will load you into a window that may or may not have a background. On top of the title, there are 2 rectangles that say to "Drag your cursor here" or "Over there> As well!". Drag your mouse there.
3. Dragging your mouse to the left rectangle will create the "Play" button. Click this to play the game. Dragging to the area pointed by the text "over there>" creates a drop-down menu, where you can choose the speed of the game.
4. Once the game is running, your player will land on a platform before entering a cool portal. You can press the spacebar, enter, or up key to move your character. Holding the key makes your character move up, while releasing the key allows your character to fall.
5. Reach 100% to complete the level, where your final score will be given exactly by (100s)/(x^(deaths)), where s is the level's speed and x is a constant left as an exercise for the reader to discover. After the level is completed, you can rerun the program to try the game at a different speed to achieve a higher score.

Class List:

• Audio
• Collision
• GameConstants
• GameSound
• GameWindow
• InputListener
• LevelEditor
• Main
• Player
• RunningPlayer

Bugs & Problems (with fixes)

• A way for the user to choose different speeds to play the game
  • FIX: Using a JComboBox, and a switch-case block to apply different speeds depending on what the user had chosen (by using .getSelectedItem())
• After pressing a button, the window can no longer read key inputs from the user
  • FIX: Use .setFocusable(false) on the button component so that after an action is performed, the Key Listener can continue to be focused on the window.
• It is very hard to implement a camera that tracks the player while updating the graphics, as well as the player's position, on the screen!
  • FIX: Make the player stay at a fixed x-position while letting the background of the level move to the left. This creates the illusion of the player moving forward in a level.
• Too many objects in the level for the computer to render?
  • FIX: When there are too many objects, an if statement is used to not draw anything that will appear offscreen.
• The setOffset() method doesn't start the music at the same place
  • FIX: Use a different value as the parameter so that there are more times when the music starts at the same place
• Adding +dx to every 4-5 digit value in all of those 2D arrays...too much work and hard to understand
  • FIX: A function is used so that the position of objects created is fixed to a grid, and thus the position of these objects in grid units is much smaller.
• When the player becomes smaller, using hitbox /= 2 results in the hitbox rapidly reaching zero, and vice versa for becoming bigger
  • FIX: Since the player's hitbox can only be 40x40, 20x20, or 10x10, every transformation scenario can be written out, with what the player's hitboxes will be in each case.
• Button not showing in the title screen
  • FIX: Using the FlowLayout from Lipogrammer worked out very well, as well as some instructions for the player written out in text on the window.
• A way to center text
  • Using the .getAscent() method from the FontMetrics class allowed us to get the dimensions of any string of text on the screen, and the problem is reduced to centering a rectangle on a rectangular window.

Key lessons learned

• How to initialize audio from a file, and how to make the audio stop or start by converting it into a clip
• How to make the program read key input from the user
• How to detect a collision between various shapes
• How to create a drop-down menu with a list of options (JComboBox)
• How Thread and Runnable work to run a game

Further development

• If we had more time, we would make more levels, try representing objects in an ArrayList, add more graphics to the game, or create a level select and pause menu.
• Other areas of RND:
  • Explore modeling the player's movement by including a vector for x and y velocities so that other gamemodes, such as cube or ship, can be accurately implemented as well.
  • Remake the project using JComponent.paintComponent(g) instead of Window.paint(g) so that there will not be issues like the button not showing.
  • Add a camera to track the player so that the player can move higher than y=720.
  • Add a Level Editor GUI so that a level can be edited directly by the user in a window.

Credit List

Websites

• Java API
  • Allowed us to learn about Fonts, Graphics2D, Stroke, RenderingHint, and much more
• Music: F-777 - Sonic Blaster (HJfod Remix) - https://www.newgrounds.com/audio/listen/976863 (Free for use)
• Most of the game graphics: https://geometry-dash.fandom.com/wiki/Level_Components
• Plastic bottle cube: https://www.pngfind.com/mpng/iiooTim_plastic-clipart-water-bottle-plastic-bottle-png-clipart/
• Plastic bottle wave: https://www.nicepng.com/ourpic/u2q8e6y3i1w7r5u2_plastic-bottles-clipart-full-water-bottle-clipart-png/
• Recycle Bin: https://www.hiclipart.com/free-transparent-background-png-clipart-iexyq

Labs

• Diploma
  • How to use the extends and super keywords to achieve an IS-A relationship
• Lipogrammer
  • How to create a button on a JFrame with a container and a layout
• Foot
  • How to draw images on the window
• Stars
  • How to use for-loops