How I built a randomly generated maze game with keys, a monster, and a working GUI.
This project came from a class project where I had to make a game and present it by the end of the school year.I wanted to make something that would push me and I’d been learning about object-oriented programming, arrays, and event handling, and I figured building a game like this maze game would be a great way to bring it all together.
The game generates a new maze each time you play. Keys are placed randomly throughout the maze, and there’s a monster that roams around trying to catch you. To escape the maze, you need to collect the keys and avoid the monster. I created a graphical user interface (GUI) using Java’s Swing library, so everything runs in a window with visuals instead of just text in a console.
This was probably one of the most challenging and rewarding Java projects I’ve worked on. I learned a ton about object-oriented design by breaking the game into classes: one for the maze, another for the player, one for the monster, and so on.
Using 2D arrays helped me understand how game maps work. I also learned how to handle timers and repaint events to get the GUI to update smoothly, which was pretty frustrating at first, but worth it.
The monster logic was a real puzzle. I didn’t want it to just blindly follow the player every turn, but I also didn’t want it to feel like it was moving randomly. I ended up writing a hybrid logic where the monster sometimes moves toward the player and other times just wanders. That balance made the game more fun.
Making this maze game helped me connect everything I’d been learning in Java. It took time to get the little details right like making the keys actually trigger a win condition, or making sure the GUI didn’t freeze. But it was worth it. It gave me real confidence and a cool project I can show off.
If you want to check out the code, you can find it on GitHub: