Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Loading


Monday, January 7, 2013

Dialogue

A game needs dialogue. Without proper characters it becomes difficult to care about a storyline. Characters without dialogue are rarely the ones remembered. This rule of course has some exceptions, mainly in the silent protagonist department, but in general I do prefer characters that have a bit of meat to their speech.

This is why I went looking for an easy way to store the dialogue that my little fan game holds. The good part: I believe I have found an easy way. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

JSON is a language comparable to XML, only it focuses on being even simpler and thus more understandable. Here's an example of JSON:

  {
   "example":{
      "value":2,
      "value2":3
   }
}

Now the bad part:

Just with selecting JSON as language of choice to store all the text, we won't get very far. I'll still need to think of what to call all the objects and arrays I'll be storing as a JSON string, But that's something for me as dev to worry about. Instead of rambling on about this, here's the avatar of each of the characters I have included so far.


Thursday, January 3, 2013

First post!

Hey there, welcome to my blog!

What is this blog about you ask? It's about a fan game based on the Mass effect universe! Inspired by both the Mass Effect trilogy and the classic space invaders, I hope to combine the two into an excellent Java game!

Here's a preview:


At the moment I'm busy rewriting the game for the Slick2D game library, which will drastically improve performance over the previous Swing implementation. Already I'm looking at 3000 FPS instead of 120 :).