2025 · Games / Physics
Reconnect — Arcade Circuit Survival Game
Top-down arcade shooter where you repair a broken computer's circuits.
Java Game Development
The problem
Build a finished arcade game with no engine: a walkable map, items to collect, gates that block the path until you spend materials, and enemies that intelligently chase the player — all from first principles.
The constraint
Two robots-and-repair-y mechanics made it demanding. Enemies had to navigate a maze, not fly toward the player. And gates break the flow: a gate must be *paid* with collected material *and* opened — and some gates are fake, forcing the player to think, not just hoard.
What I built
The map and the enemy map are parallel int grids in Map.java — wall, path, circuit, gate, fake gate, power-up — rendered as fixed walls plus a scrolling window. Enemies split into two AI types: a grid-chaser that moves toward the player every 30 frames, and a BFS pathfinder that runs a true breadth-first search over the tile grid for the shortest route every 35 frames, both over a single Queue-based grid walk. Materials replenish inventory; paying a working gate + flicking it open wins the level; a fake gate costs you. Four power-ups (speed, +10 inventory, ghost-through-walls, invincible) drop from a timed Timer. A static minimap and detailed per-gate state read all of that from the same map arrays.
The outcome
A complete, playable arcade title written from scratch in Java — five-plus source classes, a data-driven level system, sound, high scores, and two genuinely different enemy-AI behaviours.