Many may not believe me
but programming can be fun. If you really love programming even
watching a XML file going to, or coming, from a remote server can be
fun but, of course, if your program produces something funny then
programming is also more fun. So, while looking for something to
relax after watching too much XML files, I decided to experiment with
some 2D game engine. 2D gaming has been for many years confined to
the Adobe Flash
or J2ME
“mini game” context. More recently , with the ever wider
smart-phones diffusion, 2D games have known a real revival.
Among the many 2D games
engines available I first restricted my choice to the Java-based
ones. After a short examining of available features and documentation
I decided to try first the Slick2D
engine.
Slick2D
Slick2D is a Java game
engine mostly based on the LWJGL
(Light-Weight Java Game Library) library. The aspect of Slick2D the
more appealed to me, and triggered my interest, is the ability to
begin coding a simple game by just extending a class and writing
three methods.
Slick2D offers in fact an
abstract class BasicGame,
once this class is extended just three methods have to be
implemented:
- init() : is called once when the game is started
- render() : is called every time the screen is refreshed
- update() : is called when controls (keyboard, mouse, joystick, ...) are read
The programmer can mostly
ignore the other aspects of the game and concentrate on these three
events.
Of course writing a
complete game will still be a complex task but, Slick2D makes very
simple the initial approach to game programming easing a lot the
learning curve at the beginning.
First project
To prepare
my first project I first downloaded Slick2D jar file and LWJGL zip
archive, I then extracted it in a convenient folder in my home
directory. In Eclipse I first made a standard Java application
project
