I'm going to be making a few old school style games, side scrollers like Mario, top down RPG's like Zelda.

I'm starting this thread as a show off thread for my game development process.

I will be programming in Java. I'm also familiar with C++ so I might do some stuff in that down the road as well.

This is all preperation for me eventually doing a city simulator.

I'm following some tutorials on youtube.

Here's a tile based platformer that results from following an older tutorial on this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_IV37n-uBpRp64hQIwywWQ
Here's my results:


I can see lots of stuff I can do with this style of game. One of my favourite games was done in this style, Flashback, if anyone remembers that one. It was about a guy that wakes up without his memory on another planet and has to find out what happened to him.

It's all in Java with no external libraries beyond what Java already comes with.

Looks really cool.

I'm following some more tutorials.

It's actually really easy to set up a simple side scrolling 2D game engine.

I think I'm going to stick with Java due to the cross platform capabilities and the fact that it's just as fast as C++ now for graphics. In the past it was slower, but it's caught up.

BRAIN DUMP!!!

So, after following some tutorials and building my own 2D game engine I'm ready to brain storm some games and start developing them.

I'm going to focus on Isometric games similar to the old Legend of Zelda. You will be able to explore a map, fight enemies, etc.

For my first project I will be doing a sword and sorcery style game where you play a young apprentice wizard that picks up skills as the game progresses.

So, what do I need for such a game, besides a title?

Health so you can die, and a way to recover that health.
Mana/action points so you can't just spam all your attacks.
Various attacks from weapons to magic spells.
Enemies from animals to monsters and other people.
Random bystander people, some that you can talk to and get quests from.
A quest system with primary and secondary objectives.

I will want to make the map load like the old games where you would approach the edge and it would then load in the next map area. Don't know how to do this yet, but it'll likely be a an array like this:

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

The zeros represent the entire world, each one is a screen sized region, say 640x480.

Each map section would have a sprite tileset with collision so the player can run around within it. So, I'll need dirt, sand, snow, grass, ice, water, trees, etc, that fake a 3D look.

I'm going to start up gimp now and make some terrain tiles, I'll post them here as I get them finished.

These are my grass tiles for now. Plain grass, long grass, red flower, white flower.
I'll be putting them into a single gif once I get all my terrain tiles finished. These are all subject to change. I'm basing them off the old Legend of Zelda graphics.

Decided to go for a little more realism as far as a tile based game can go.

The first 3 are grass tiles, 2 with flowers, next is gravel, next is sand with one having a spiky plant, the last is water.
I'm going to add snow and ice, water with a lilly pad, lava, rocks, and maybe a few other things.

I just spent an hour tracking down a bug in my code. The output listed like 30 errors, in the end it was just one little line of code that I forgot to put in. I know this doesn't look like much right now, but this is an important step in setting up the game.
I'm calling it "The Apprentice" right now. The main character is a young student wizard and is represented by the magenta square. The green background is the ground that an individual can walk on is located. The red outline is the edge of the playing area.

The magenta square can only move to the right as of this screengrab. The red will have collision detection so you can't walk through it. When I add sprites the red will be replaced with trees, rocks, and other things the player can't climb on, move, or walk through. I will add other objects either as map items, like non-moveable rocks and such, items that are larger than a 30x30 sprite will be added the same way an enemie is added, load the sprite and place it over the green area.

I have the collisions and directional controls working, so the magenta square is now trapped inside the green field with red walls. It looks the same as the previous screenshot though so I'm not going to bother posting another.

Now that this is set up I'm going to need to create the sprites for the local environment and the player.

I think I might model my little apprentice wizard after a garden gnome. A little guy with a blue cloak with a pointed hood.

I'm also thinking I'll use larger sprites for the game. It's the 21st century, I shouldn't have to make sprites that would work on early 1990's consoles.

I'm trying to get better at making these sprites.