JavaFX Community Game project

[Daniel Zwolenski]

Maybe we should start with tower defender first and work our way up to a
Club Penguin clone? :)

A quick search of the web - looks like the oss tower defender games are
pretty rough. The code is pretty simple to write so we might be best
creating our own. It should be a pretty basic tiled map for the background,
and then a fairly simple sprite engine with bounding circles for
collisions. Not exactly rocket science. I'd be quite curious to see the
code for this Fossil game to see if there's anything we can leverage (not
sure "Fossil" is something you want to include in your branding when trying
to make Java have modern appeal, but anyway).

The main concern I would have is some nice slick graphics. For a showcase
product, if the graphics aren't good then we are better off not bothering.
I have the usual design skills of a programmer (i.e. I know magenta and
green don't go together but that's about my limit). Does anyone have good
(and I mean pro) design skills, or know someone who does?

Are there any graphic designers available through Oracle who could be
available to work on this? I have some awesome designers I use, but none of
them care about JFX so they sure won't be doing this sort of stuff
pro-bono.

For my money, the themes that work best are the cutesy-fun graphic themes,
not the nerdy ones with dragons or space ships (unless they are cute or
funny). Angry Birds, Plants vs Zombies, Cut the Rope, etc.

http://www.reigndesign.com/blog/what-do-all-top-selling-iphone-games-have-in-common-its-the-controls-stupid/

We could even start simpler than tower defender and do something like Fruit
Ninja. That would be ridiculously easy to code but maybe not quite as
engaging if you're on a PC using a mouse. I'm pretty easy on the game
selection so long as it's simple to start so we can get some quick results
(and simple "sells" better, complexity is only fun for us nerds).




On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Tom Eugelink <tbee at tbee.org> wrote:

> On 2012-12-04 22:54, Daniel Zwolenski wrote:
>
>> Quite a bit more complex to build but I built Coinland (effectively
>> Penguin with much less bells and whistles) with a team of 4 devs in 3
>> months so it's not out of the realm of feasability.
>>
>
> Is that full FTE? Because if I spread those hours over my hobby time
> available...
>
> Tom
>
>