John Marco | Star Sign Project Hub

Overview

Inspired by Cookie Clicker, I purposefully kept my first game simple to focus on key mechanics: progression loops, milestones, and achievements. Players create a "cracker empire" by upgrading from basic Mold Presses to magical generation methods, unlocking hidden achievements as they progress.

Features

• Dynamic achievement system driven by external CSV data configuration.
• 5 upgradable structures that calculate exponential resource generation using custom mathematical equations.
• Custom user interface built utilizing Java Swing components (JPanel, JComponent, JButton).

Challenges and Solutions

Challenge: At first, I tried to create custom UI interactions using raw coordinates and rectangles. This led to inflexible and hard-to-maintain code.

Solution: I looked into Java's built-in GUI features and used JPanel and JButton structures. This made the UI lifecycle better and helped me learn more about event-driven programming.

Challenge: I wanted a strong achievement system, but I saw that hardcoding many milestones would lead to a messy and hard-to-scale codebase.

Solution: I separated the data from the game logic by building a CSV parser. This let me easily load, scale, and update achievements from an external spreadsheet without needing to change any Java code.