Hello everyone!
A friend of mine asked me how he could start programming games in Java, without having to make
his own menu-system and learn a lot about animations, before he could get started. He just wanted
to play around with something simple, like a boardgame. Nothing too crazy. Something like “Risk”.
There are many good Java tutorials out there, but few tackle the difficulties of dealing with Swing-
menus combined with a drawable canvas, and fewer actually describe and explain what they’re doing
to make it all work. It quickly becomes magic to many. I’ve tried to make a simple, thoroughly commen-
ted project, with a few helpful modules to get started with. They’re not completely optimized or state-
of-the-art, but that’s the point. I wanted to make a project a newcomer could look at, and easily learn
from and expand on.
I’ve covered the following:
- Creating the JFrame with the correct desired size / handling insets
- Loading images from within your Jar
- Loading images from a folder next to your Jar
- Setting up two menus; one to the right, and one at the bottom
- How to fill the menus with buttons and labels where you want them
- Comprehensive customizing of JButtons and JLabels
- Custom cursor
- Creating a simple canvas to draw on
- A very simple gameloop implementation, just to explain the concept
- Drawing strings and rectangles
- Very simple keyboard- and mouse-implementation
- Reacting to controls on the canvas
- Changing stuff in the menus and on the canvas, when the canvas registers clicks or keystrokes
- How to get error-logs when running your game as a Jar
- Customized close-operation attached to the JFrame
- Using HTML to add more lines in your JLabels, JButtons and tooltips
It is a zip file, which you should be able to import directly into Eclipse. It is Java 1.6.
Download Zipped Eclipse Project
Download Runnable Jar
NOTE: The project is set up, so if you swap the worldmap-image for another image, it can resize itself automatically.
The project is meant as a simple example of a layout, from which one could make a decent game,
given some time, and some activity in a Photoshop-like application. It should be pretty easy to
completely remove the existing menus and create your own playing field, but if you are a newcomer,
I’d advise you to read through everything carefully first, to ensure that you know what is going on.
For now, the mouse- and keyboard-modules aren’t commented. Big whoop. If I get around to it, I’ll
upload a new version, and update the link.
I hope this helps someone out there. Any suggestions welcome.
Sincerely, Jonas Tingmose aka. Ultroman
Screenshot:
http://img441.imageshack.us/img441/5475/boardgameexample.png