How do I Start Developing A Game (No, not a newbie)

I’m sure that whoever is viewing this post first saw and went, HA nooob! No, I’m not new to game design I have been doing so for a few years now. Anyways, I have never really made a quote-on-quote big project in jME, and I was wondering where do I start? This will be a game with a story/cutscene in the beginning and then you go on to other things. Ever played Shaun White Snowboarding? It starts out with a story and then you can go on and just go to whatever you like, snowboarding down 1/4 or 3 mountain you can choose from. I want to do something like that and I didn’t know how to start? How do I start with a cutscene and then things happen after you have done X? Or have something happen after you reach point X?
Thanks so much,
-cMp

File-> New Project

good luck :slight_smile:

Im really going to hope that youre joking and that the rest of the community is little more helpful :wink:

I’m trying to reconcile “not new to game design” with “how do I design a game?”… and it’s tough. There is no shame in being a noob. Everyone was at some point.

The answers may seem flippant but the question is too big to give a meaningful answer without writing pages.

All I can suggest is break it down into chunks. If those chunks are too big pick one and break that down again. Eventually you find something small enough that you know how to design/write that.

Once you have that chunk do another one that plugins into it, and continue.

So in the example above pick something (for example the mountain chooser) and write that.

Then create a snowboarder.

Then a mountainside.

Then get the snowboarder running down the mountain.

Etc.

Divide and conquor is the only way to handle a large project.

Zarch, thanks for the answer I’ll look into doing that! And pspeed I agree I am a noob however at jme not game design. Hey, we’re all noobs at something after all, right? :slight_smile:

I think the question I was trying to get at was how do you guys start deving? What do you set up first?

@icamefromspace said: File-> New Project

good luck :slight_smile:

this is what i did: took big sheet of paper and wrote everything that i wanted to be in my game, then tried to draw some game scheme how everything works, and finally tried to do it step by step.

@Slyth said: I think the question I was trying to get at was how do you guys start deving? What do you set up first?

Nothing JME-specific, or in fact nothing specific to game programming.
As erasit wrote: first, get an idea what you want to achieve, then start coding.

After that, you get the usual cycle of hitting walls and circumventing them, occasionally redefining the goals in the process.
This gets rarer with more experience with the toolset.
But again, that’s the general course of events when starting to work with a new toolset, and in no way specific to JME or game programming.

You might have wanted to ask what walls there are, for JME, or for game programming.
That would take days to answer; game programming needs performance, and optimizations mean you lose generality and have a higher chance of hitting a wall.
So answering THAT question requires knowing a bit more about your ambitions.

@Slyth said: I think the question I was trying to get at was how do you guys start deving? What do you set up first?

Check out the manual, under “Best Practices” you will find a lot of information.

@Slyth said: I think the question I was trying to get at was how do you guys start deving? What do you set up first?

The other answers are good. There is nothing JME specific really about this. If you’ve designed games before then just do it the same way and figure out how to adapt that to JME. Go through the tutorials to get familiar with how to translate.

How many games have you written before and on what platforms? They can’t be too dissimilar.

I’ve written pretty much only 2d in LibGDX and plain java2d (I know, you don’t have to say it…)
I’ve really not done a real game in 3d before. Everything I’ve made had also never had a story, they are more or less free roam/tower defense. So I’ve never done games that have stories and cutscenes. I’m planning on a mountain climbing sim. Where you can climb Everest and other random gen mountains.

@Slyth said: I've written pretty much only 2d in LibGDX and plain java2d (I know, you don't have to say it...) I've really not done a real game in 3d before. Everything I've made had also never had a story, they are more or less free roam/tower defense. So I've never done games that have stories and cutscenes. I'm planning on a mountain climbing sim. Where you can climb Everest and other random gen mountains.

Maybe try doing some simple 3D games in genres that are already familiar to you (tower defense, etc.) to get a feel for the engine. I think the rest becomes easier then.

Ah I forgot to mention the 2 little ‘games’ I made with this engine to get used to it! I’m sorry! Yeah, I’ve already done two, not really games, but projects that got me used to how jme flows. Yes, it certainly gave me a feel for the engine (a basic feel).

in jmonkey, game code is generally exists in two types of classes. Classes that implement AppState, and classes that implement Control…

Your game will likely be 1 “master” app state that attaches/detaches and enables/disables different “slave” app states. Examples of some common slave app states are: “Game World” “Menu System” “HUD” “Player Input”.

Controls are added to specified game objects, they usually just do things like trigger appropriate animations and sounds to that object based on whats going on in your game.

This is just a guideline to get you started here. You’ll just have to start on a game to figure out how you want to organize it. There is no special framework to writing a jmonkey game. It’s just a collection of high level libraries.

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