posted 20 years ago
First you need to create a design for the game. This should concetrate on WHAT you want to do, not the specific details about HOW to do it. You've already listed some of the general details of the game. You should also consider some other details like how you want the interface to appear? Should this game run in a window or full-screen? How does the user start the game and control other actions? Is there a menu for some of this? What keys are used to control game play?
Answers to these questions will probably lead to others so you can flesh out the details of the requirements. For the actual design, you need to start thinking about what objects are needed in the game. For example, there is a playing board, so you might want to make a Board class to represent this. Similarly, you may want Ball objects to represent the four colored balls. What other objects do you see in the game? Some of these objects are concrete and come from the game itself (such as the Board and Balls). Others may be more abstract or come from how you want to display the game. For instance, you probably need a classes that extend JFrame and JPanel to implement the GUI layout. You might need other classes that implement the Action interface to respond to menu or button events.
As you can see there are a lot of things involved in creating a game like this. You need to make sure you understand GUI programming, graphics, and the logic of the game itself. I am trying to break each of these into smaller pieces. That's the whole idea: break the design down into more manageable pieces. Sometimes you have general pieces that need to be broken down further into other, smaller pieces.
I hope this gives you an idea. Feel free to use this message board as a cardboard analyst. Post any ideas you have and we will be glad to give suggestions.
Good luck.
Layne
