Coke And Code - Java Games and Games Development - Games

Star Dodger - Flash Game (I R Traitor)

Sat, 27 Sep 2008 00:20:38 +0000

I've been wanting to learn some new skills in game development, kinda feel like I've been stagnating for the last year or so. A few years ago I had a go at flash games development, mostly because it was there. I couldn't get anywhere, the free and open tools were just hard work. For last week I've been experimenting with AS3, FlashDevelop and the Flex SDK. These tools, while not as nice or as powerful as the Java tool set (Eclipse+JDK), are actually adequate and I've found myself able to be pretty productive. It's also nice to not have the distribution head ache running round in the back of your mind while coding.

Anyway, I'm going to be remaking some of old games (mine and others) in an effort to learn a bit more about Flex and AS3, the first of which is what this blog post is about. My first remake of pretty much the simplest game I could remember:

Click Here to Play Star Dodger

This was more an experiment into how to build a simple game in flash, how to integrate the wonderful Mochiads and hopefully how the flash playing communities respond to games - thats where I'll go next I guess, search around and find out where to submit this sort of thing.

Anyway, so far, not so bad. I'll be feeding the cool bits about as3 back into Slick development and probably whining on about the bad bits here :)

Double Edged Sword in Java 3D development

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:12:50 +0000

It's a wierd thing when someone announces a new project, especially someone of note. In this case one of the key developers of JME (who recently announced their departure) Josh had announced the creation of a new 3D engine (along with another of the developers of JME, Rikard). They're calling it Ardor3D and it sounds like they're focussing on top end game development.

It's exciting, it's new and I wish them the best of luck. I think everyone has known for a while that what we currently have in Java 3D space is starting to look a little behind the times - though plenty good enough for most of the projects out there. Josh describes in detail each of the reasons for this which make good sense. Can't wait to get my hands on whatever they come up with! :)

However, it's also a sad day, when JME can be called dead or dieing. I don't really think thats the case. I think it's a technology thats powerful and useful but has reached breaking point in terms of code base. The tools are there, we can use them albeit not top end games development - who was really going there anyway?

Me? Well I'll be dropping my 3D project for now, maybe reworking it into JPCT - I've been meaning to have a go at that for ages anyway. As always the software is designed to switch renderers at the drop of a hat so thats all good.

Right now? Other fish to fry :)

EDIT: As a side note, check out the wonderful ads that google selected for Josh's post. Ford should be proud!

A Two Dimensional Distraction - Seven Day Mash Up

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 23:10:13 +0000

I was getting a bit bogged down in Salvage Rights, it's a bit and complicated beast to code. To keep motivated I decided to take a quick detour back to my beloved 2D game development home. However, since I don't want to totally lose track of SR - a seven day mash up was in order.

(for anyone that doesn't know, 7 day mash up = seven days - or evenings in my case, focused on making a single game with little regard to code beauty of expandability. Just make it work god damn it!)

So I'm officially 7 evenings along now (though I didn't work on it one day this week for other reasons). It's not finished, not nearly, but it is playable and does have a some of the game there. Mostly just scripting more story in left to do (which of course I now want to do, but fighting to get back to 3D).

Here's Niche, a silly platformed hacked about in 6 evenings. All graphics were produced by me, you'll be able to tell. The story is also mine, again, I make no apologies.

You can try it via Webstart. I'll probably get some more done next week.

Blood Effects - JME

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 17:41:41 +0000

I'm working on a little side project at the moment, but I've meaning to post some screens up about progress on Salvage Rights. The last thing I worked on as getting aliens in there and allowing the player to rid the world of the alien presence.

Before hand, there's an alien that the player discovered...

And after, the alien isn't there so much:

Particle effects in JME are an easy and powerful way of making things happen in game. This particular effects looks great in motion and took only about an hour to tune up.

Nice work JME.

Children's Game Websites

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 06:56:26 +0000

I'm lucky, I have an excuse to be playing kids games on free websites. My daughter, who's nearly two, loves playing on the computer - clicking colourful things and getting wierd noises.

I've always been a fan of the CBeebies website, it has a lot of familiar shows that she enjoys on the TV. However, being the hobbiest game developer I am, I can't help but evaluate the games on the site and can see that they both are lacking in design and polish.

Thats why it was such a refreshing change to see the Disney Playhouse site - Meg has a need for Tigger everything just recently. The games are incredibly polished with really high quality audio and visuals. The site itself is well organized and loads quickly even on my terrible connection.

The thing that struck me most was the quality of the game design though. Each game we (I) played was really top notch. In some parts Meg got annoyed with me because I wanted to carry on playing the game. Some of the game design is so good I couldn't help but thing an adult remake of it for the casual market could be a hit (I took notes of course :)).

I am left feeling slightly overwhelmed with how good these "throw away" games are and how far I have still to go to produce anything like as good.

Directional Shadow Mapping in JME

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 07:51:01 +0000

Spent a long evening last night reworking the shadow mapping stuff from Salvage Rights into a reusable pass for JME. Few things needed to happen

- Tidy up the code, a bit of a mess initially
- Switch from perspective mapping to parralel for direction light sources (the only ones I use)
- Make everything configurable
- Integrate the shadow mapping extension access in JME.

Didn't get the last one done. At the moment the pass still has a few lines of direct OpenGL access in the middle of it. I'd rather these were replaced with some JME functionality, right now it's bound to LWJGL rendering. The rest is done but the pass still isn't really finished. It needs:

- Support for multiple light sources in one pass (multitexturing?)
- Automatic determination of view focus via the frustum centroid. Still got no idea what that last sentence means.

I'd also like to add cascading shadow maps at some point to get the resolution up. Anyway, here it is:

I opened a forum post over at JME to try and get the community to help me fix it up to be good enough for everyone. Have to wait and see what happens.

As always, I want to use the code (thats why I wrote it :)). The nice bit was making the pass generic and fixing it up a bit actually gave Salvage Rights a bit of speed boost. More importantly the shadow resolution looks fine with only a 512x512 shadow map now which is really awesome :)

Issue and Bug Tracking Software - a rare find

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 11:48:46 +0000

I like simple tools. Really simple tools. All these stuff I do for home is small scale, it doesn't need to be industry strength and it doesn't need to be highly available. I need tools to jobs that are as simple as possible to set up and maintain. I just don't have time for anything else. For instance, I love SimplePHPBlog. No database, no configuration. Downloading, unzip and use. Great stuff. JBoss AS is the same, wonderful stuff to be working against, download, unzip and use.

Recently I've been in need of some issue tracking software. I'm starting to get too many bits of paper to hold on to and issues are getting lost. At the moment I have a 2 bits of A4 in front of me littered with thoughts and issues with the latest project, Salavge Rights.

I went to look for software. I want something simple and web based (so I can access it from lots of different locations with ease). It needs to track ideas, let me update them and mark them as closed. It may need to support teams eventually but probably not right now.

Everything I could find required dependency X, Y and Z. From libraries, to databases, to masses of configuration. And then I found Code Track!. Seriously, check this little beauty out.

No database required - check it uses flat XML files
Handles all the normal sort of issues things - check, basic but clean
Supports teams of people - check, without any work
Simple to install and configure - they claim less than 5 minutes

Now, I dispute that last point a bit. It only takes 5 minutes if you include the download time. Less than 2 minutes I would have thought was a more accurate description. I'm very impressed.

Thingle in JME

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:27:37 +0000

Well, that was was pretty easy once I got over the initial hurdle of having GL state destroyed by shadow mapping. Rendering and input both seem to work ok with this first hack at using Thingle in JME.

Cool beans:

Next, um.. pretty motivating scenes :)

Here Comes Space Hulk Again

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:37:16 +0000

Here I go again on my own... going down the only road I've ever known...

Better performance than last time it seems, go JME! :)

Pixel Art is Hard

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:05:16 +0000

Damn, pixel art is hard. I wanted to give it another go - my past attempts have not been good enough for me to even post. So an evening has gone by, following a few tutorials and trying to design a character I want for a future game Pobo - Galactic Explorer. After hours and hours of pushing pixels onto the screen I get this:

Static and walking. It's um, good for me and probably good enough. Does make me realize quite how much time and effort artists put into these things. Kudos guys.

New Putty Puzzle Version - 36 Levels

Thu, 29 May 2008 18:46:42 +0000

There's a new version of Putty Puzzle up. It contains:

- Levels filled up to 36. Some might get swapped yet, was just nice to see the board full.
- 6 new level features to play with
- White putty is now transparent to help hint it might not be normal Smiley
- Some visual tweaks to add a little polish
- Bunch of bug fixes (probably introduced some too Smiley)

Putty Puzzle as Java Web Start
Putty Puzzle as LWJGL Applet
Putty Puzzle as Pure Java 2D Applet

Putty Puzzle - New Version

Mon, 19 May 2008 01:28:48 +0000

It's late, and I'm tired. 2.30am and for better or worse I've just put up the new version of Putty Puzzle. It has:

- 18 Levels - 6 of which are optionally tutorials (frank will help you out if you ask).
- Instructions Page
- Lots of bug fixes
- Some usability fixes
- A few new level features
- Undo during the level
- Undo, restart and quit visible options

No apologies for bugs and/or typos. I've still got a lot of work to do. Thanks to the people who contributed levels.

Putty Puzzle as Java Web Start
Putty Puzzle as LWJGL Applet
Putty Puzzle as Pure Java 2D Applet

Game Specification

Wed, 14 May 2008 11:35:39 +0000

When working in a team of developers, or even when hoping to succeed with a single developer project it's important to have an overall common shared concept of what the final game is going to be like. Of course, this being games development, this is open to change during the creative process, but the specification of the game describes what the game is, how it's going to work, whats going to make it fun and what's going to keep people coming back. This is especially true when working with distributed group of contributors.

Before the Java folks start jumping around, I'm not talking about software design/specification here. For small games it's often not worth worrying about software design documentation since the majority of it is just following known patterns that most capable developers don't really have to think about. For larger ones software specifications are still only largely interesting to the developers. The game specification sets the mood/feel of the game which should feed into every aspect (art, sound, development, etc.)

Anyway, this came up due to yet another conincidence. Yesterday someone was asking about how to write them, and today I was hopefully joining a team thats developing a game which needs a specification. So, while I'm not terribly proud of them here's the examples I have of some game specification:

Two reasonably complete ones from a while ago :-

Retailopia

Battle Scape Armada

And one that I posted recently thats still in progress :-

Into the Expanse

They might not be great but at least they might stir some mental juices.

Putty Playable

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:15:43 +0000

There are 6 whole levels of putty challenge in game to play now! An in game level editor and a walk through tutorial. Go on, give it a go!

You can either Webstart it or play it as a slightly beta LWJGL Applet

Look out for the bonus typos. Please note the game is still very much a work in progress, there will be plenty of bugs.

EDIT: There's a new pure Java applet available, it's much smaller and is probably more compatible for running in the browser.

EDIT 2: The game has been updated. Lots of levels have been moved down and a bunch of optional tutorials have been added. Please note that most of the previous comments we be slightly out of sync with the game.

Prototype as an Applet

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:27:12 +0000

Slick has just been moved onto LWJGL 2.0b1, which gives us access to the new awesome applet stuff. Essentially there is no long some hack to render to a Java canvas, at the native layer the good old native display is connected to the canvas directly as a child - rendering smack over it, lovely.

What this means is we're starting to see much more stable LWJGL applets, with fantastic performance (going all the way up to JME based stuff) and of course a new focus on getting the download size smaller for applet use. It's all a good thing I guess :)

Anyway.. since we just moved.. I thought the prototype could be tried as an applet. You can view it over here.

Many thanks to kappaOne for some great tips and scripts to make the whole thing look a bit better than just an applet splatted on a page.

1) It's prototype, the game might not be perfect :)
2) The applet code is still new, last few kinks being worked out, be warned.
3) THE LEVEL IS POSSIBLE AS IT STANDS! If you see something that seems to stop you, it's probably part of the puzzle.