The need for sheep

Hello, today I'm going to talk about a little project I've been working on to address something that's severely lacking from my favorite game engine, tutorials! That's right, I've been working on a super simple project with the intent on turning it into a short tutorial series!

Now some of you may be familiar with another blog I started once upon a time, Adventures in jMonkey Engine. (WOW, was that really 5 years ago?) Back then I barely understood java let alone jMonkey as a game engine. I started the blog with the intent of "learning" both java and jme through teaching it. I wound up giving up on after I hit a major roadblock on my rc car game project which ended in my taking a hiatus from game development for several months and generally forgetting I had that blog at all.

Back to the present, my wife recently told me she wants to learn java and help me make games! She has absolutely 0 experience with java and programming in general, but she loves video games, which is honestly all I think you really need nowadays.

I decided to make some new tutorials that approach jMonkey's way of doing things and really showing how to utilize the different aspects of the game engine. I'll focus on setting up the jMonkey IDE and focusing on best practices for creating games in jme. There are a few tutorials out there already but a lot of them are old or are long videos with no voice over and showing a highlighted mouse waving in front of what is being demonstrated. jMonkey doesn't have many tutorials that could be compared to what more mainstream engines have such as Unity's "how to make an fps" tutorials.

So I'm finishing up a small demonstration game which I will then break into pieces and put together a "how to make a game in jme" series which will be uploaded to this blog and maybe youtube(not sure). Here's a couple screenshots showing where the game is now. It's still a little early so some assets will change but the core gameplay is set!

Well that's all for today, just letting you all know what I've been doing and giving you something to look forward to!

Gothic is out

Gothic is up on Itch.io, for a multiplayer game it does not have a game browser or any easy-join functionality. You'll have to find other players and share ip's and set up port forwarding. There is a single player challenge mode with a castle prefab to see how quickly you can take it down, but the enemy does not return fire.

This project is now on hold until I can get enough support to justify looking into a central server. With a central server it'd be easy to implement a games browser and host games without forwarding ports, but I don't have the means to support one at the moment.

I have another small to medium sized project in the planning phase right now, Project Field. I'll have some more info on that shortly.

If anyone is interested in playing Gothic feel free to comment and I can set up times to have a server hosted on my personal computer. The only map in the game is 2 teams at the moment but each team can have multiple players controlling it! They share resources and units can a lot of fun can be had assigning roles within the teams and coming up with strategies to counter your opponents onslaught.

It is also extremely easy to add new maps or units to the game. Even though the project is officially on hold (kinda like Reindeer Rearing) I might swing around and add a new map or two. If you like making maps for games take a peak in the /assets/ directory (open the .jar with win rar as if it were a zip archive). There is a simple xml detailing the info for a map, and a text file under /assets/Scenes/Maps that you can append with the xml for your map and it will appear as a selectable map in the game. The challenge castles are a regular xml you can open and modify as well, and can be listed in a map as a valid challenge target.

I apologize for Gothic coming out in such a state but I wanted a chance to put the game out there as an early prototype to see if people are interested in this style of game. Single player would be an awesome addition but writing good ai for an rts is difficult and time consuming, especially for a project I am unsure will be played enough to justify the amount of time involved.

One Game Mechanic Jam 3

This weekend I took part in a little game jam held on Itch.IO by Game Dev's Quest. I kept the game super small this time with the focus only on interactive buttons and dials on pre set machines. Here's my submission.

LemurUI really helped a lot this time around. It's strong integration with jMonkey engine allows the ui to be implemented in any way you can imagine within jMonkey's scene graph. This means all those 3d buttons, the lever and dials are all gui element "MouseEventControls" and mouse event listeners. The ability to put this control on any spatial in the scene graph is awesome and something I will definitely make use of in the future!

I also used ZayEs entity/component system again. This is simply my favorite addition to jMonkey and really makes storing data with game objects a breeze. Each station added or changed components based on user input. The bottle spatials were also handled by the components using the component filter system which is something I haven't tried before. It's probably not the cleanest way to do things but it really allowed for rapid prototyping and I always new exactly what code was responsible for different things.

I had fun in this jam and look forward to the next one ;)

Project Gothic

Working title: Project Gothic
Defend your keep while you smash your opponents! At the moment I only have multiplayer working. I will upload it as soon as I have a simple "time trial" single player, and I'll eventually add in ai opponents.

This project was a LOT of firsts for me. Building a game for multiplayer from the ground up requires a very different mindset and I hit a lot of roadblocks along the way. I try to rely on as few external libraries as possible to keep the design as clean as possible. I use jMonkey Engine as it's a very good, easily expandable engine based on lwjgl. For the UI I use Lemur GUI which is built from the ground up to work with and resemble jMonkey's scene graph and spatials. This makes adding and modifying ui elements extremely simple. I also use ZayEs Entity-Component system. By following "pure" Entity-component design philosophy I was able to add in complex systems that are very modular in nature, and allowed very easy online integration and I can trouble shoot each system independently. This does come with a memory over-head of storing large numbers of component objects and systems often have similar structures that are kept separate from each other. I feel requiring more memory is worth the trade off of having very distinct systems and components with very few cross contamination.

The assets are very simple assets I threw together quickly to have something playable. I probably won't revisit the assets unless this project gets enough interest.

Well that's all I have for right now. Expect something playable to be uploaded in the next couple of weeks!