Map Editor

Over the past couple of days I've been working on a map editor to make creating maps easier. Basically you can select a tile on the right and it will draw on the grid panel. It features drag drawing, a stunning but soothing light purple grid color, and a beautiful translucent highlighter that highlights the tile that your mouse is hovering over. It also has a menu that creates new maps of a specified size and name, and saves and loads as per usual. Still some kinks to work out; the way I have it right now if you try to make a map 300x300 tiles or so java will run out of heap space... D:

I also made some changes to the structure of the main game code so now the map loading is much more efficient. Before each tile held a reference to its image but now all the images are held in a hashmap in the imageloader and each tile just points to the corresponding one, so it can load maps of any size no problem.

Going to China tomorrow morning so it'll be a couple days before I can get back to it.

Oh btw

First update!

So I've been working on a 2D tile based RPG game in Java for the past month or so, though I only started coding about a week ago. Actually I just looked up when the files were created and it was exactly one week ago...within 30 min :D. Before that I've studying up on game programming basics like the game loop, animation framework, image loading, collision detection, sprites and good OO programming. I'm writing everything from scratch, and as of now I'm not planning on using any third party game engine or framework, though depending on how things go I might have to migrate to one. I've also written a good bit of the basic story line and history, and planned out most of the game mechanics.

Game mechanic-wise it's essentially going to be a mix between Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy, where you walk around and explore the world, but at certain points you are presented with a scenario that you must complete at which point the game becomes a turn based chess-like strategy thing (like in Fire Emblem). When you attack an enemy the combat is similar to Final Fantasy, and you will have a party too.

The game is very early in the development stage. Right now I have the basic game frame down, and have written most of the core code for characters, maps and tiles, a timer, and a camera that determines what is visible on the screen. Here's what it looks like right now (video quality's really bad sorry).

You can move your character around and it moves smoothly from tile to tile and the camera follows the player. I just finished the camera class and it took a while to figure out how to get it to follow the character smoothly and pan around the map so patting myself on the back right now :). You can pause the game and change screens, where esc goes to the "title" screen and C goes to a blank black screen. As you can see there is occasional glitch with the character rendering, I might try to fix that later but I'm not too savvy with graphics stuff like hardware acceleration so I might just leave it. 

My friends Allan and Brandon are helping with the project: Allan's doing some concept art and might eventually end up doing most the game art and Brandon is helping me code.

I most like won't finish this summer, but either way its gonna be KICKASS.

Mike