Wednesday, 16 February 2011

Boogaloo

It has been some time since I did a bit of game development. Recently, a local game competition inspired me to do another little game. After puddling around a bit, I decided to stop development and to call the game finished [a.k.a. version 1.0].

The game itself is the simple snake-eats-apple game with an interesting twist: you have to control two snakes at the same time. Surprisingly, this small variation to the original idea adds a little bit of puzzle and a lot of fun.

I built the game using Scala, Swing and Java2D. I also made use of an indie game library (GTGE). The game is very simple, so the services I used from the library were minimal. However, I must say I liked the simplicity of the library API and I would gladly use GTGE again.

It is the first time I tried the JAVA VM to develop a game. As an experience, it was not as bad as I expected. The deployment package is a single JAR file that you should be able to start playing with a double-click on the jar file (on most modern PC platforms).

Why not give it a try -- download the executable jar file from box.net.

If you get more than 600 points, you should really consider quiting that day job ;-).