Any Good Beginners Tutorials?

Newbie & Debugging Questions
#1

Hi everybody, I just joined after taking a look around this site and not finding exactly what I needed. I’ve organized the important parts of this topic below:

Learning History / What I Know

I’ve taken half of an “Intro to Java” class (the way my school schedules stuff didn’t let me take it, and I’m not sure if they even offer it next year :frowning: ) and I’m pretty sure the next half of the class would start with arrays.

In that class I’ve learned IO, if/else, for loops, (do) while, switch case, swing GUIs (VERY basic, just displaying them, not customizing, JOptionPane), basic math (including modulus), parsing, string manipulations (toUpperCase, etc.), type casting, (returning) methods, final variables, FileReader, printf, and System.exit(#).

I also made a few console games in my free time, learning some extra stuff: basic Thread (only Thread.sleep() ), random numbers (Random() ), how to use break and continue, and declaring multiple variables on one line (and not initializing them).

I’ve tried learning C++ too, so I have some basic knowledge of enums and arrays from learning that. I don’t really know how to use them, just what they are and how they work.

The most complicated thing I’ve probably every made myself can be found here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ovssr8y17iv0yw4

What I Want To Learn

You probably know about Catacomb Snatch by Mojang, so you have a basic idea of what I want to learn.

It’s mostly 2D graphics and everything associated with them. Sound, images, files from external sources (all games have some sort of sound/images folder), how to use classes, etc. I know people usually start with pong & sorts clones, but I honestly have no idea how to do that.

And one last thing. NO applets. I want a separate application window like normal games. Learning how to make it fullscreen would be nice but not necessary. Some sorts of games that I would like to learn how to make are:

A top-down old school dungeon RPG:

Top Down Shooters (Catacomb Snatch):
Billions of videos, you probably already saw some…

Thanks for the help! :slight_smile:

#2

Catacomb Snatch is a frenzied steampunk-themed shooter, I’m not sure I’d classify it as being similar to an old-school dungeon RPG other than being tile-based and top-down.

Either way, a 2D toolkit like Slick2D would go a long way. Start small, just draw a simple map the size of the screen, then get a character that can walk around the screen, then start scrolling it. You have the basic programming knowledge, so it’s really just a matter of learning a new API.

#3

I was saying that I would like to make old-school dungeon RPGs and games like Catacomb Snatch, not that it was a dungeon RPG.

I have no knowledge on how to even get a window to appear, never mind drawing anything on it. After I learn how to do the simple things I can learn how to do that. Obviously I would need to learn how to do even simpler things, like combine classes to work together.

#4

Slick2D does have tutorials on its site, so getting things to appear is not that much a problem once you’ve gone through one. The biggest shift in mental gears you’ll have to do is to get used to working in a rendering loop rather than pausing for player input, but since Slick uses an active rendering loop (you tell it what to draw and when) rather than a passive one (where you write rendering callbacks), even that is not all that jarring.

http://slick.cokeandcode.com/wiki/doku.php