When Worlds Collide

I'm a few days into trying out some ideas for Kingdom and have enjoyed some success with getting a few ideas to work.

Generating levels completely from scratch was the initial plan but after some consideration I've elected to implement a sort of half and half approach. The basic outline (walls and floor) will be done by hand but all the detail and populating of levels will be done in code. This allows for quick creation of each level and ensures a good degree of quality control; it also affords differing types of level without the need to develop separate algorithms for each type.

Funny looking cave

At this point, I've implemented some file i/o to load the raw level data and a basic detailing function to work out where the walls meet the floor and select the correct blocks accordingly.

Further to that, basic player/world collision detection is working as it should so no more warping through solid rock and other such nonsense.

At this point I feel positive at having broken the back of the new concepts needed to get this thing off the ground. It wont be plain sailing but right now I can't think of any part of the planned game that I don't at least have a good idea how to do. It's a good place to be.

Branching out

Right, so it's been a while since I did any game development. After the last couple of releases for Android tanked badly due to lack of exposure, I felt less than enthusiastic about the platform. Getting any kind of audience for a game or app on there is quite random/difficult - a common story when reading other developer's tales.

My next creation will be desktop based and written once again in Java. I've written about Kingdom before on this blog and am finally getting a crack and developing it - after 18 years since the idea first arose!

The weekend has been spent wrestling with new concepts and ideas surrounding Java game development for, in my case, Windows. I've been getting to grips with delta timing and the various requirements for building the most basic parts of a Java program's framework.

Brother Mike and his friends

Right now, we have Brother Mike, standing in a field with nothing but some debug information for company. Using the cursor keys he will move around, or rather hover around as he is not animated yet.

The main character will be one chosen somewhat by the player, with a few customisable options, as is the style in RPGs. That's all a long way down the road at the moment. This will be the largest project I've ever undertaken singled-handedly and so I'm expecting many month of development before it's ready. Once the overall framework is more mature, the game will appear to grow more quickly - right now, it's mostly behind the scenes stuff.