So I've been making board game Funny Bunny (children's game) on Java. I first made it text based but now I've been building a GUI for it using Swing. The trouble is, I've never made a GUI before and tough the GUI itself has been fairly easy to make, I find it incredibly hard to combine my game and the GUI.
I'll first explain the basic idea of the game.
THE GAME
There's a deck of special card that "run" the game (4 types: move 1, 2 or 3 steps and card for changing the board.
One turn consists of player revealing a card
If it's a move card, the move a piece If it's change the board card, the board changes and holes may open. (Some places on the board aren't safe, game pieces might drop in a hole)
So, the idea behind the game is fairly simple.
The trouble, I've got no idea how to actually make it work with a GUI. I tought it'd be rather and started enthuastically building my GUI. I made the game view (I'll add a picture), main menu, number of players menu and all that stuff just to realize that I don't know how to really make it work with event-driven game.
Game view, work in progress, never mind the colors
I'd like to GUI version work along these lines 1. First, bunch of menus for setting up the players and stuff. That's okay. 2. In the game view, player reveals a card by pushing "Show card" 3. Based on the type of the card enter either stage: 3.1 Move a game piece. This would happen by clicking a game piece (either button on the side or a piece on the game board) --> This would start move a piece process --> Requires updating the board in the end OR 3.2 Change the board, which would updating the GUI board. I'm really lost with how to do this.
Should I use something like threads, or Swing Worker or what should I do? Do you people want to see some sample code? That'd probably help. Just let me know, and I'll post some (it requires some translating with the comments and stuff and that's why I didn't want just randomly post parts of my code here)
All help, comments, feedback... everything would highly appreciated and really helpful. Did I already mention I'm lost and stuck? I really am.
You'll want to foster the concept of Model-View-Controller. The idea is to separate you program into layers of responsibility.
The model is responsible for maintaining the data and stateful information about the program.
The model provides event notifications about changes to its state, which interested parties might need to know
Is responsible for representing the current state of the model(s) on the screen. It is also has direct connection to the user and is responsible for collecting user input which is handed to the...
Is responsible for binding them together. The controller takes input from the view and makes modifications to the model, based on it's rules.
The controller may even control information flowing from the model to the view.
In some implements of the MVC, the view and the model have no connection what so ever and only communicate via the controller. This is both good and bad. It's kind of bad as the controller needs to double up the communications coming from the model and pass them to the view, acting as a proxy, which can duplicate code. It's good as it protects the view and model from modifications which the controller may not allow for, based on it's rules. I tend to try and follow this model, but Swing itself hides the controller within the view, so it can seem more coupled.
This concept also relates to the idea of code to interface and not implementation. This means that the model, view and controller only know about the "contract" and not the details.
This allows you the flexibility to change the implementation (let's say, add network play-ability for example) without the need to change the entire program structure, as the components are only communicating with each other through the defined interfaces.
The overall intention here is to separate responsibility and allow each layer deal with it's own set of problems without mixing the through out the code. It also means that you can change certain layers over time with out adversely affecting the rest of the program, as they are not tightly coupled together
Now that you're probably completely confused, you could have a look at this example which demonstrates a login MVC
