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!