Hello all, this is my first post in this forum - I hope you are all well. Firstly, i have been reading these forums on and off for around a year now, and i have finally registered! There are alot of posts regarding people making new games eg rpgs, and i am one of those people! However, i am starting at the very basics. Basically i want to create a map consisting of a 4x4 grid (tiles), with a character that can move 1 space every time a jbutton is pressed (ie 1 movement point/end turn button) - Please note, i do not intend to develop a side scrolling tile based game, but a strategy game (think civ but 100xsimplier). The purpose of this post is for someone with knowledge, not to give me the exact code (although it would be nice), but to link a url/pdf to a complete tutorial/walkthrough IN JAVA. Now, i would like to make clear, that i have been doing extensive searching on google (web pages and pdfs) for weeks now. Most of the topics i find are for vb, c++ or flash. Secondly, there are a lot of tutorials that explain things such as pathfinding, ai, influence mapping etc - these i have on favorites. I also have alot of source code from many java sights on similar game engines (such as laser squad remakes,chaos remakes,civ remakes) - but as a relative beginner to "game programming", its hard to make sense of it all (which is why my first goal is so simple). The best tutorial/walkthrough i have found, is unfortunately for flash , and is for a side scroller (although concepts could be used). It is found at http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/start.html. So far i have worked out this. 1) a java file for the map - creating using an array with 1 and 0. 2) a java file for identying 1 and 0 as a wall or grass. the closest thing i can find to what i want to create can be found at http://www.planet-source-code.com/vb/scripts/ShowCode.asp?txtCodeId=3352&lngWId=2 Unfortunately i cannot get it to run, but there is a screenshot there. I have used many keywords while searching eg tile-based, turn-based, java, tutorial, article, source-code, walkthrough, development etc.but cant find exactly what i require. If no such site exists what would my best course of action be? what beginner game should i make? Chess? tic tac toe? thankyou for reading, and i SINCERELY apoligize for the length of this post - I wanted to show i have set my target to the very simplest of concepts, i had some knowledge of what to do, and that i had been searching! p.s. i realise there is a section on 2d tile-based/isometric maps - i have checked through tutorials and forums. i beileved that a "java" forum would be the best to post! :-)

hello and thankyou everyone for your replies.

I apoligize, as i have had to make a new account as i accidently deleted the password sent to my email address.
Alot of the links look good - a few i have seen before, such as amits site(i was actually in contact via email to him last october for a short while i was working on an artificial intelligence map generator). I will definitely bookmark these urls for future reference.
As stated before, i realise that implementing ai and the such is a long way off - currently i am aiming only to make a 4x4 grid made of white boxes and black boxes, and a red box that has movement points and can move 1 square a turn - i learnt from my previous project to simplify each program function as much as possible, in order to understand it.
The demo that was linked - although it is a real time rpg engine, im sure once i print out the code and analyse it, i would be able to figure out how to write my own version, with "movement points" added in. Wish me luck on this lonf journey and good luck to you on yours!