Switch to a proper game engine. Coding everything in Java is going to take you a lot longer, and end up a lot worse. An example is Adventure Game Studio.
Put a design document together, and then start looking at indie game forums for help. You likely won’t receive anybody dependable since you’re not paying them, but even a little bit of assistance makes a difference. Then you won’t have to spend so much time focusing on the graphics.
Switch to a proper game engine. Coding everything in Java is going to take you a lot longer, and end up a lot worse. An example is Adventure Game Studio.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I’m not sure of any game engine that would be particularly useful to this project, since most of the features will relate to the Bayes net mechanics, and I’d be very surprised if there was any game engine that had been developed to help with those. I looked at AGS, but didn’t see anything particularly useful in the feature list or getting started page.
Put a design document together, and then start looking at indie game forums for help. You likely won’t receive anybody dependable since you’re not paying them, but even a little bit of assistance makes a difference. Then you won’t have to spend so much time focusing on the graphics.
I might do something like that later on, thanks. Currently I feel that a playable prototype would be more useful for getting people interested in actually contributing than a design document would, so I’ll work towards that as the first priority.
Notice that only one answer states you should avoid a game engine altogether. Another answer suggests a game framework, which is closer to an engine than what you’re doing. Everybody else say use a game engine unless you just enjoy building game engines. A game engine will simplify a lot of your current tasks like having built-in GUI systems for things like buttons, layers for hiding/showing or activating/deactivating different objects without moving to a whole new screen, a method for quickly positioning objects on the screen, a better graphic rendering system to reduce processing power requirements, etc. Designing a tool for handling bayesian probability is just a small part of the steps to building your game. AGS isn’t necessarily the engine you should be using, but you should be using a different toolset than just Java. The time spent learning an engine is lower than the time required to do this from scratch.
A combination of Java’s existing GUI libraries and JUNG seems to take care of those things pretty well so far. It does need some amount of hacking to do the things that I’d like it to do, but that’d be the case with any pre-existing solution.
The question does ask “or should I make my own engine”, which is different situation from making a 2D game on top of basic graphics libraries that’s not much at all like existing games. Game engines are generally expected to involve an extensive visual game world with many assets and behaviors to manage, and this project doesn’t seem to have one.
For 2D GUIs, there are programming techniques like imgui for making a GUI while keeping the program architecture lightweight. Out of the free existing GUI frameworks, Qt is pretty impressive.
Suggestions:
Switch to a proper game engine. Coding everything in Java is going to take you a lot longer, and end up a lot worse. An example is Adventure Game Studio.
Put a design document together, and then start looking at indie game forums for help. You likely won’t receive anybody dependable since you’re not paying them, but even a little bit of assistance makes a difference. Then you won’t have to spend so much time focusing on the graphics.
I appreciate the suggestion, but I’m not sure of any game engine that would be particularly useful to this project, since most of the features will relate to the Bayes net mechanics, and I’d be very surprised if there was any game engine that had been developed to help with those. I looked at AGS, but didn’t see anything particularly useful in the feature list or getting started page.
I might do something like that later on, thanks. Currently I feel that a playable prototype would be more useful for getting people interested in actually contributing than a design document would, so I’ll work towards that as the first priority.
http://www.quora.com/Should-I-use-a-game-engine-that-is-already-made-or-should-I-take-the-time-to-make-my-own
Notice that only one answer states you should avoid a game engine altogether. Another answer suggests a game framework, which is closer to an engine than what you’re doing. Everybody else say use a game engine unless you just enjoy building game engines. A game engine will simplify a lot of your current tasks like having built-in GUI systems for things like buttons, layers for hiding/showing or activating/deactivating different objects without moving to a whole new screen, a method for quickly positioning objects on the screen, a better graphic rendering system to reduce processing power requirements, etc. Designing a tool for handling bayesian probability is just a small part of the steps to building your game. AGS isn’t necessarily the engine you should be using, but you should be using a different toolset than just Java. The time spent learning an engine is lower than the time required to do this from scratch.
A combination of Java’s existing GUI libraries and JUNG seems to take care of those things pretty well so far. It does need some amount of hacking to do the things that I’d like it to do, but that’d be the case with any pre-existing solution.
The question does ask “or should I make my own engine”, which is different situation from making a 2D game on top of basic graphics libraries that’s not much at all like existing games. Game engines are generally expected to involve an extensive visual game world with many assets and behaviors to manage, and this project doesn’t seem to have one.
For 2D GUIs, there are programming techniques like imgui for making a GUI while keeping the program architecture lightweight. Out of the free existing GUI frameworks, Qt is pretty impressive.