Starting with which game? (newbie)

[ThePrinny]

Hello, everyone!

Discovered this forum after reading parts of Killer Game Programming. Not sure where to start, making a game is so different from making a traditional application it kinda hits me how a game should flow when the program starts/pause/resume. Like I said, been reading that book for a while, then I helped myself to read a few topics here to glue together my requirements of what I need to know before starting but it’s still not enough I guess.

About the Basic Game, is the Canvas is some sort of component too?, never seen the Canvas class before so I’m guessing it’s sort of like a JPanel or something like that. (Still learning Java, slow but steady ).

The UI elements used in some games in the showcase, are they Swing buttons, or do they create their own customized UI for the game?

Anyway, besides those questions, most important one is which game should I try to program. I tried to do tetris but without any guidance it was mostly a hopeless attempt, couldn’t do much.

Cheers,
David
P.S my bad if there are some grammar errors! Main lang is spanish

[CyanPrime]

Basic Game seems to be a full templet, and not a panel.

[ThePrinny]

@CyanPrime

Basic Game seems to be a full templet, and not a panel.

Ah no, I didn’t mean that, was just wondering about the java.awt.Canvas class and what I could do with it.

[princec]

More or less all you can do with it is draw on it. You can get it double buffered using BufferStrategy, and render it actively in a loop, like most games do.

Cas

[kappa]

@ThePrinny

The UI elements used in some games in the showcase, are they Swing buttons, or do they create their own customized UI for the game?

Depends, most will create their own especially when not using Java2D.

@ThePrinny

Anyway, besides those questions, most important one is which game should I try to program. I tried to do tetris but without any guidance it was mostly a hopeless attempt, couldn’t do much.

Personally I like shmups, they’re pretty easy to code and they cover most of the basics you’d need for general games programming.

[ThePrinny]

@kapta

Depends, most will create their own especially when not using Java2D.
Personally I like shmups, they’re pretty easy to code and they cover most of the basics you’d need for general games programming.

it looks fun :), is there any resources available (like ships, pew pew lasers lol, etc) ?

The only problem I’m having is this… I don’t know how to answer it myself since I never programmed a game.

Moving forward,up etc, thats all normal, yet moving the whole background along… I load the background, paint it to the canvas. How should I “move” the background so it seems like I’m moving through space? my bad if it looks confusing, kinda hard to elaborate =/

[kappa]

@ThePrinny

it looks fun :), is there any resources available (like ships, pew pew lasers lol, etc) ?

There are plenty of resources online, just google for them and if your just learning you can just use ripped sprites from shmup games (again theirs tons of sites that provide these).

e.g. you could use http://www.flyingyogi.com/fun/spritelib.html

@ThePrinny

Moving forward,up etc, thats all normal, yet moving the whole background along… I load the background, paint it to the canvas. How should I “move” the background so it seems like I’m moving through space? my bad if it looks confusing, kinda hard to elaborate =/

Not all shmups have scrolling backgrounds, and if your considering space for a background then you don’t even have to scroll the background, just have the random speed stars (white dots) scroll past on the black background.