Hey everyone, I'm looking for a good book/website that can help me learn to write java games. I don't really care if its applet or application based... I'm more concerned with learning game logic and the actual skills and ideas needed to create games. My interests are rpgs and strategy games, but It would be cool if it started with basic stuff like pacman, tetris, etc. I know I need to build my skills before doing more complicated stuff. Id prefer if it avoided 3d, because that's way out of my league at the moment. I have a decently firm grasp of java.. from the beginning all the way through polymorphism, inheritance, etc. I have a bunch of java programming books but nothing about games. Anything you would recommend??

Practical Java Game Programming, is a good book. Look it up on Amazon.

Quote:Original post by biggjoee5790
I don't really care if its applet or application based...

No one writes applets any more.

It's definitely good to start simple. Tetris and pacman are great for that.

Java is generally not a good fit for games. As a language it's perfectly capable (fast enough, with enough library bindings), but the mindset and the community supporting Java is not games. You might find it hard to get help. However, compared to C or C++, you're likely to get much farther as a beginner.

For general principles, you can use books and tutorials in any language. If you know OpenGL in C, using a Java binding for OpenGL is a piece of cake.

For setup and library support, you will need to do some research. It shouldn't be too hard, though.

One piece of advice for doing Java. Don't get caught up in the bullshit boilercode. People will tell you "good" Java programming is where you never use singletons and where you make each field private and write a public getter and setter. These are very important principles for writing enterprise software. But for a toy game, it's a total waste. C does just fine with public everything and global this and that where it's really needed.

Quote:Original post by Tac-Tics
No one writes applets any more.

Plenty of Java applets have been written lately and are still being written right now, many of them games, most with hardware-accelerated 3D support using LWJGL or JOGL. The Applet plugin itself has gone through major improvements in terms of stability in recent years.

Quote:Original post by Tac-Tics
Java is generally not a good fit for games. As a language it's perfectly capable (fast enough, with enough library bindings), but the mindset and the community supporting Java is not games.

There is community support for making games in Java. Apart from people here at GameDev, there is also JavaGaming.org. There are also numerous Java game middleware libraries such as jBullet, Slick, and the many libraries released by Three Rings Software. The Project Darkstar, axed by Oracle last month, is now a community project, too. Not to mention the gazillion Java ME games on mobile phones around the world...

thanks alot guys. Basically I had to take a java class.. Im a cs major. And I fell in love with the language. I decided to stick with it and get good with it. Im gonna search for some books and see what i can find. any other suggestions are appreciated.

There are also various game tutorials here. They are not necessarily examples of clean code, so you'll have to do your own thinking if you make something significantly more complex, but they can give you some ideas about how you can easily put together a smaller game.