Java Tetris

A Java Swing implementation of Tetris built for the Programação Orientada a Objetos (POO) course at LEI (IPT). The project demonstrates OOP fundamentals - inheritance, polymorphism, cloning, and encapsulation - applied to classic Tetris mechanics.

Overview

The board is rendered as monospace text inside a JTextArea, with all game logic (piece movement, rotation, collision, freezing, line generation) implemented from scratch, without any external game library.

The repo contains two NetBeans/Ant projects:

Project	Description
TetrisFinal	The complete game: full Swing GUI (main menu, about, rules, options screens), configurable board size, all 7 tetromino types. This is the project to run.
SuperTetris	An earlier prototype of the core Block / BlockMatrix / Piece classes, kept alongside unit tests used to validate the model before the final GUI was built.

Features

• All 7 standard tetrominoes (I, J, L, O, S, T, Z)
• Piece movement (left/right/down), rotation with basic wall-kick handling, and hard drop
• Configurable board dimensions (rows/columns) via spinner controls
• Main menu with About and Rules screens
• Random piece generation and game-over detection

Architecture

Core game model (TetrisFinal/src/classes):

• Block - a single cell, identified by a char id (. for empty); supports copy-construction and cloning.
• Empty - a Block subclass representing an empty cell.
• BlockMatrix - a 2D grid of Blocks with clone and in-place rotate() (matrix transpose + reverse) support.
• Piece (classes.pieces) - extends BlockMatrix, adds an (x, y) board position and movement methods. Each tetromino (PieceI, PieceJ, PieceL, PieceO, PieceS, PieceT, PieceZ) is a Piece subclass that hardcodes its own shape.
• Board - extends BlockMatrix, owns the currently falling Piece, and implements collision detection, movement validation, rotation with wall-kicks, freezing a piece into the board, and loss detection.

GUI (TetrisFinal/src/gui, NetBeans .form-backed): MainMenu, Tetris (game screen), About, Rules, Options.

Requirements

• JDK 19+
• Apache Ant (or open directly in Apache NetBeans, which the project was authored in)

Running

cd TetrisFinal
ant run

Or open TetrisFinal as a project in NetBeans and run it directly.

Controls

Movement is button-driven from the game screen: ◄ / ▼ / ► to move, ↻ to rotate, FALL to hard-drop the current piece.

Authors

Group project for LEI/POO, by Bruno Freitas (@viribusegovis) and Vasco Alves (@vascobrissos).