Puzzle Games

People love to solve puzzles. Puzzle games appeal to a search for order in chaos and can also provide hours of fun. If the total number of hours a student spent playing Tetris were amortized over the total amount of time spent in class during a college year, the result would most likely show an amazing number of hours spent playing the game in contrast to studying. The puzzle genre is alive and well to this day. Many Web sites have implemented Java applets for popular games such as Chess and Spades, as well as a number of original puzzle titles. A recent game of note that was built in Java is the innovative massively multiplayer online (MMO) pirate role-playing game (RPG)/puzzle by Three Rings called Puzzle Pirates (see Figure 1.1). In Puzzle Pirates, players participate in pirate adventures in an online RPG, but when trouble breaks out, the players must use their powerful puzzle-solving skills to overcome adversity.

Figure 1.1: Puzzle Pirates by Three Rings.

Puzzle Games and Java

Puzzle games leverage some of the best aspects of the Java platform. Games that don’t require intense timing accuracy work incredibly well and provide a strong productivity boost because of the wide range of graphic tools and multimedia libraries. Puzzle games can be distributed as applets or stand-alone applications, allowing them to work with multiple rendering pipelines (Abstract Window Toolkit [AWT] or Java OpenGL [JOGL] API/J3D). Java’s strong networking and database support lend themselves to creating and storing a lot of information for the player, such as rankings or high-score tables.

On the downside, although puzzle games can be distributed through a range of methods, those that are run online through applets must contend with the fact that many Web browsers are not released with the most current Java Runtime Environments (JRE). Therefore, the applet developer must post new locations for players to download the latest JRE. Although this fact might not seem to be a major disadvantage, the fact that applets can’t work as simply as they were designed could turn some players away from a game. Additionally, for games that require high-performance timers, developers could see the lack of timer support as a limitation to some types of game play that might require a high-resolution analysis of when input is received or a move is executed.

Generally speaking, the puzzle game genre represents one of the most ideal and immediate prospects for any new Java game programmer. In summary, Table 1.2 lists the major benefits and concerns when using Java to create puzzle games.

Table 1.2 :  PROS AND CONS OF JAVA FOR PUZZLE GAMES

Pros	Cons
Offers a platform on which one can easily develop games for release as either an applet or as a stand-alone application	Timing concerns could affect certain types of game play
Provides a built-in application program interface (API) for rapid development boost	Many browsers ship with outdated Java Runtime Environments