Game Gardens
Game Gardens is the creation of Three Rings Design. The idea was that developing distributed multiplayer games required a hosting setup and free games hosts are hard to come by (if any do even exist). Additionally, extra programming is always required to make the multiplayer action possible. So they developed an interface to (hopefully) simplify this process. The main Game Gardens site has a number of free games developed by people using this API (if you build one, you can upload it there as well). Additionally, Three Rings Design has created Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates (see Figure 2), which looks pretty cool in a lego-ish sort of way.
To start, the documentation of this project is much like many pre-1.0 projects—basically a matter of checking out the samples and posting to the message board if you have questions. The message board seems to be monitored by developers and there are a few things to be found and get you off and running. Developers using this these tools can access three libraries:
- Narya: this varied library contains tools for everything from graphics (a la OpenGL again) to character, distributed environment trickiness, chat, rooms, and more.
- ToyBox: this library contains the core inner workings for the client and the server aspects of the application.
- Samskivert: this library handles some basic things from Web application tasks (e.g. servlet utilities) to Swing jobs (e.g. drag and drop utilities).
Game Gardens seems to be a little more accessible to beginning game programmers (let's face it, unless you've developed in other languages, Java just hasn't been a gaming language). You can develop some rudimentary games and scale into the larger 3D extravaganzas.
Figure 2. Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates: Three Rings Design created this game.
Cooler and Crazier Games
Java is finally approaching the realm where game development is not only feasible, but actually worth looking into for game developers. The portability and networking features that have made Java as ubiquitous as it is today can only help to make cooler and crazier games, enabling players from all over the world to interact. Using the Game Gardens utilities can ease the development of distributed multiplayer games—both on the client and on the server. And LWJGL will enable the development of robust and fast games that can be sold online or at your local Best Buy. For any Java developers curious about game development, I recommend checking out these open source projects.
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