Reversi Tutorial

Welcome to the new and improved Game Gardens Game Building Tutorial. In this tutorial, we'll walk step by step through the process of creating Reversi using the Game Gardens toolkit. Along the way we'll introduce you to the various concepts and building blocks so that you can easily take the next step and create your own exciting games. Now, on with the show!

Note: in order to develop games for Game Gardens, you're going to need some familiarity with the Java programming language. If you have never done any Java development before and are not familiar with development in a language similar to Java, you will probably want to find yourself a good introductory book on Java development and work through that before you tackle a Game Gardens project.

Installing the Tools
To start, you're going to need three pieces of software:

1. Java Development Kit (JDK) If you're developing on Windows or Linux, go here and click the link that says "JDK 5.0 Update N" (where N is the highest number) then pick the one appropriate for your platform. You don't need the version that comes with "NetBeans" or "Java EE", just the plain version.

If you're developing on a Macintosh, go here and check the "Getting Started" section for instructions on how to install the Java development tools.

2. Ant Ant is a tool that we use for building our projects and running the client and server in test mode. This page has instructions on how to download and install Ant for various platforms.

3. Game Gardens Development Kit This one is easy, just download one of the following two files: and unpack it wherever you like.
 * game-gardens.zip
 * game-gardens.tar.gz

Making the Game
Note: Throughout this tutorial we will assume you are compiling and running the code from the command line and we will display commands to be executed as follows:

% command arguments

The % represents the prompt you'd see at your command line and should not be entered when entering the commands.

With that out of the way, let's get to the main parts of the tutorial:


 * 1) Generate the Skeleton Game
 * 2) Define the Game State
 * 3) Display the Game State
 * 4) Add User Interaction
 * 5) Implement the Game Logic
 * 6) Polish Things Up
 * 7) Upload it to Game Gardens