The Road Ahead¶
The handbook grows with the games: a chapter is written when its game is finished. Here is where it stands and where it goes. Each game adds a few new ideas, and the engine grows with them.
Written¶
| Chapter | Game | New in the engine |
|---|---|---|
| 0. Setting Up | ||
| 1. Why Our Own Engine | ||
| 2. How a Game Is Built | ||
| 10. Mines | Mines | High scores, game menus, high-score dialogs |
| 11. Solitaire | Solitaire (Klondike) | Undo and redo, animation (easing, tweens, an animation timer), the game clock |
| 20. Paddle | Paddle (Pong) | Game loop with a fixed time step, active rendering in logical coordinates, full screen, keyboard input and controls, scenes, sound effects and a mixer |
| 21. Bricks | Bricks (Breakout) | Swept box collision, sprites with a cache per screen size, particles, frame times, pixel mode and an overlay layer |
| 22. Snake | Snake | A ticker for rules with a pace of their own, random numbers that repeat, replays |
| Java2D and X11 Pitfalls | The rules for fast and correct drawing, collected |
Planned¶
Part II: Action¶
| Chapter | Game (in the style of) | New in the engine |
|---|---|---|
| 23 | Rocks (Asteroids) | Vectors, rotation, wrap-around, object pools, circle collision |
| 24 | Swarm (Galaga) | Sprite sheets and animation, entities and components, flight paths, waves, spatial grid, music |
| 25 | Maze (Pac-Man) | Tile maps, movement on a grid, AI as state machines, breadth-first search and A* |
| 26 | Blast (Bomberman) | Up to four players, gamepads, timers, events, chain reactions |
| 27 | Jump (platformer) | Scrolling camera, maps from the Tiled editor, gravity and jumping, parallax, saving progress |
Part III: Strategy¶
| Chapter | Game (in the style of) | New in the engine |
|---|---|---|
| 30 | Towers (tower defence) | Mouse in world coordinates, overlay menus, units and towers as data files, flow fields for many units |
| 31 | Sands (Dune II) | Selecting units, group pathfinding, fog of war, minimap, resources and buildings, computer opponent, saving the whole game |
After Sands, an economy game in the spirit of The Settlers and a city builder in the spirit of Pharaoh need little new engine, but a lot of simulation: production chains, transport, population, trade.
Appendices, also planned¶
- Engine reference: every package of amade-game-engine, with the chapter that introduced it.
- Glossary.
Suggestions and corrections are welcome as issues or pull requests. Each page has an edit button at the top.