Conway's Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life implemented in Java with a Swing GUI. Built as a learning project to get hands-on with Java windowing and object-oriented design.

Jan 2026  ·  Completed

This was one of my first personal projects, something that I did not think was too difficult but still allow me to learn new things in the java area. However, I was mistaken, this was actually quite a challenge as I had to fully learn Java Swing to even get started it felt like. But eventually, I figured it out and made it happen.

A Java implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, the classic cellular automaton where simple birth-and-death rules produce surprisingly complex patterns. I built it to get hands on with Java GUI and windows (Swing) and to practice structuring a program with object-oriented design.

What it does

• Simulates Conway’s Game of Life on a grid, evolving the cells generation by generation
• Renders the live grid in a Swing window and steps the simulation on a timer
• Keyboard controls for interacting with the simulation

Tech

• Java — core language
• Swing / AWT — JFrame, Timer, and key handling for the windowed GUI
• OOP — split into Game, Grid, and Controller classes to keep state, rules, and input separate

What I learned

This was a focused exercise in two things I wanted to get more comfortable with: building a real windowed GUI in Java with Swing, and structuring code cleanly with object-oriented design rather than cramming everything into one file. Splitting the simulation into a grid model, a game loop, and a controller made the rules easy to reason about and the input easy to extend.