Good tutorials?

General Discussions
#1

Hi

I’ve just got into game programming and did a great tutorial at www.planetalia.com. This is a basic 2D space invaders game, but has given me a good start I think.
I was wondering if anyone can recommend any good tutorials I should try out next to broaden my knowledge.

Thanks

#2

Kev’s space-invaders is very popular. You can get it on:

http://javagamesfactory.com/articles-content.html

…along with a few others. The tutorials section has largely stagnated in the last couple of months because:

  1. I’ve been busy working on the complete re-design of the site, so there’s been no-one to actively seek out tutorials
  2. With the current (old) site I couldn’t appoint tutorial-editors to do that themselves. One of the major advantages for the new one is that I can delegate this 100%.

What that means is that once JGFv3 goes live we’ll go on a quest for more java game programming tutorials to add. We’ve also been gathering links and texts for a section of “tutorials we found elsewhere that are really good” but that’s fragmented into various files on my hard drive right now so I can’t easily copy/paste it for you.

If you get stuck, try gamedev.net. It’s java tutorials suck, but the general games programming ones are often quite good. And there’s a heck of a lot of them.

#3

Thanks a lot for that! I’ll check out Kevs invaders…

#4

I’d also be interested in more Java game tutorials. I did Kevin’s tutorial a while ago, and recently I looked at the planetalia one, but I think I’ve had enough of space invaders. I wish someone here would do a tutorial for a platformer or an overhead adventure game. I know it requires a lot of time to do these, but they don’t have to be that complex, just enough to convey the basic way to approach these types of games.

I’ve found that this website is very useful:
Java Games Programming Techniques

It’s an online version of an upcomming O’Reilly book on Java game programming. It’s good, but a large portion is on 3D games which I have no interest in at this point. The best format for a tutorial I’ve ever seen has got to be the planetalia.com one–very easy to read and follow. I would love to see more tutorials like that in the future.