LWJGL, Slick and Slickset - Java Game Development
May 9th, 2008 | Filed under Programming.Programming other people’s systems is hard. Programming your own apps is easy, you just make them do what you want. The only hard bit is stopping when they’re finished, or continuing when it gets slightly tedious.
I don’t like tedious coding. I’d rather go away and code a code generator, or use Excel and search-and-replace, or anything that’ll solve the problem with the least amount of effort. I’ve got SQL stored procedures that generate C# code from other SQL stored procedures.
I’ve got that urge to write some simple retro-styled games again. I keep getting this idea every so often, but then give up when it comes down to actually writing them. I either can’t decide what to do, or get bored hand crafting yet another sprite library and doing my own implementation of collision detection.
Fortunately them I’ve found three things that’ll make my life easier. LWJGL is the Lightweight Java Gaming Library, which is quite nice. Built on top of this is the Slick 2D game library that removes some of the tedium of moving sprites and handling their collisions. Then, to make it even simpler I found something called SlickSet which is a 2D game engine. It’s got premade collision detection, “actors” and ways of managing lists of things.
It comes with nothing but the Javadoc for documentation, but the examples are fairly simple to follow. I intend on working out my own little sets of documentation, then sticking them up here at some point.
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