The hunt for the lost rainbow jewels, WIP

[Vandar]

The Hunt for the lost Rainbow Jewels is my latest try to create an rpg. It's a toy project, which I work on when feeling bored.

Story: The rainbow jewels have been abducted from the temple of the rainbow colors, and the world will slowly fade to gray if you can't retrieve them.

At the moment it's mostly a tech demo of display code, map creation and map transitions, and most of all, item generation.

Currently you can explore three maps. You start in a sort of dungeon with 50 imps, testbed for some AI code, and a place to collect items. The imps won't fight with you, but you can kill them if you want to.

Upstairs from the imp dungeon there is a small village with two shops. This village will be the official starting place, once the game is more complete.

And east of the village is a sort of forest map, which is just there to have one more map.

Project page on Sourceforge, including downloads:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/jewelhunt/

The project is written in Java, and uses the LWJGL library for graphcis and sound.

The code is available under the GPL v2, the graphics and sound effects have various free licenses. A list can be found in the credits.txt file, included in the download. Most gfx and sfx are from opengameart.org

[charlie]

Looks pretty neat. I can do Java, might poke around a bit!

[Vandar]

Looks pretty neat.

Thanks

Important classes are the "game" class, which links most of the stuff together, and the "world" class, which is responsible for keeping mobiles (players, monsters) and item lists. I must admit though that the code is not particularly well structured, because it has grown from a spontaneous idea. Horrid stuff is the display code, but it seems to be "good enough" and didn't cause any problems yet. It uses OpenGl as rendering engine, but internally it's all 2D code.

[charlie]

Well "good enough" beats "aiming to be perfect but doesn't do much yet" which is a mindset one too many open source developer seems to fall into.

[Vandar]

I had my share in overengineered solutions too. Particularly when new to programming I was very proud on those solutions, but later had to learn how difficult they can be to maintain. Then there was a phase of underengineering, and soon being stuck with designs which were too hard to expand. Oh well. It's hard to find the right level, but at least I now know examples of both problems, and can avoid those