Asteroids an arcade classic, published in 1979 by Atari. Sporting some simple black and white vector graphics, old school sound effects and some simple physics I think Asteroids will be a good game to start with. Not too easy and not too hard.

I have been researching Java frameworks to help with the cloning of Asteroids. Since my main focus is on cloning classic arcade games, it makes sense to use a framework that will take care of the details concerning rendering graphics, collecting player input, playing sounds and managing game assets. My research has led me to this great Java applet library called Pulpcore. It handles all of the basics needs for a 2d rendered game implemented as a Java applet. In short Pulpcore makes a great boiler plate for my arcade game clones.

Even tho I am going to use a third party library for the graphical rendering, sound and input all the clones will run in a similar manner and it make sense to reuse as much of that code as possible. This leaves me to design a basic clone framework built on top of Pulpcore to handle loading the right assets, displaying generic menus, high score entry and display screen. This then frees me to focus on cloning the game play for each arcade game and not rewriting the same high score table five times.

I have started to flesh out the main classes and interactions in the framework by creating some quick prototypes and using UML to model the ideas generated. I recommend StarUML for drawing UML diagrams. It is free, open source and works great for me.

I will post some more details on the framework design as I complete it. If you are thirsty for more Asteroids information you can read the Asteroids Overview and the Asteroids Specification