13 casual games, and a game engine

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#1

Hello everyone,

I have two things to present here, namely a game engine and a collection of games.

I’ve been working on my own game engine for the purpose of writing 2D “classic” games as quickly and easily as possible. I started off with 3 example games–that was almost 2 years ago–and by now I have 13. I am particularly interested in making interesting modifications to classics, or creating original game concepts. The games are all “casual” games. The game engine itself is fully documented so it should be quite useable for other game programmers. It’s meant to be a “high level” engine, delegating as much of the “boring but time consuming” (for me at least) part of game programming to the engine, so one can concentrate on the game concept.

You can find the JGame project homepage here:

http://www.13thmonkey.org/~boris/jgame/

The games can be run as applets here:

http://www.13thmonkey.org/~boris/jgame/games.html

Kind regards,
Boris van Schooten

#2

So it is more like a scripting a game?

I must admit i rather like getting my hands dirty with code so it is not suited for me but i can see it being useful for prototyping or so real beginners.

#3

Well, no, it’s definitely not anything like Flash-style scripting, if that’s what you mean. It’s also definitely not like a content creation system, where the game mechanics are essentially fixed and the developer basically creates levels and graphics. It’s more or less a regular programming API/engine, in which I’m trying to find the essence of “best practices” in 2D game engines.

I do happen to be interested in ways to create prototype games by basically filling in parameters rather than coding. I’m trying to implement this on top of the JGame engine (I call it the Gamegen engine). All I have to show now is a simple Web-based form version which is limited and buggy, but I’m working on a Java version that works by specifying a list of plugins and filling in parameters for each plugin. Right now Gamegen has background generation plugins, object plugins, and event plugins.