I’ve decided to take the jump and enter the Seven Day Roguelike (7DRL) competition starting next month. The challenge? Write a complete “rogue-like” adventure game in just seven days. The additional challenge is that these include WORKING days, so there’s far less time in which to do it.
My first inclination was to do it in Python with the PyGame SDL libraries on Linux. Trouble is, nobody will ever see the game that way. So while talking with Kasul last night, I decided to reach deep into my past and write it as a Java applet.
Years and years ago, I worked for a company called Harcourt, a publisher of textbooks that at that time was looking into running an online university for distance learning. Since the courses were to be web-based, they had a vast need of interactive web applications. I wrote a couple dozen small applets to support the courses, and along the way, I wrote the beginnings of a Java game engine to help make things pretty. The below applet illustrates the dual-slit diffraction experiment that helped prove that photons could be considered both as waves and as particles.
The smooth operation of the controls, the double buffered graphics…. The package also included a graph paper canvas which I used for several applets, including this one illustrating the tangents to arbitrary curves….
So, I have my old game engine available, and examples of my older applets to start with, and I think I’ve just shown I can get sophisticated programs working in a browser. It’s a start! All those years ago, I bet my career on Java Applets instead of Flash. That was a bad bet. Maybe someday they’ll make a huge comeback.