Just extract all jars in one folder and add its content to your jar. Or use maven and the Assembly Plugin or similar. Dont forget the licenses...

Assembly sounds OK.  I just want to avoid adding another pile of shit to my distribution.  I used to add a lot of bloat out of ignorance, and I'd rather learn how to use the classpath correctly.

One of the things I like about AS3 is that you can embed your assets and distribute everything in a single .swf file.  But all the Java libraries I've used have a bunch of external dependencies which need to be included in a folder outside the .jar file, and then distributed in a .zip file.  Is there any way around this?

I know there's a class loader out there that does this (http://one-jar.sourceforge.net/index.php?page=introduction&file=background), but I also know I've played one-jar games before their product came out.

I would probably want to see an example game being made, a simple one, that progresses with each lesson, if I was a beginner.

Yeah, I was planning on making a simple game and walking the attendees through the design process.  I want to concentrate on the ways that programming a game is different from programming other applications (update and render loops, event timing, entity movement, asset loading, etc).  I figure that, once people know the basics, they can learn on their own the technical details of a language, and the broader issues of what makes the game fun.

I like the board game idea.  I thought of bringing in a checkerboard and walking through the init, update, and render steps with the board to show how it works.

I live in a pretty small college town, so techie people eventually learn about the hackerspace by word-of-mouth.  I don't think there's an online resource for finding them, and I'm not sure I would trust one anyway - if it's not big enough to hear about by word-of-mouth, it's probably not worth going to.

I'm volunteering to teach a game design course for the local "Hackerspace".  I'm no expert, but I'm the most qualified person in the group, so I feel like I should pitch in.

The audience will be local amateurs & hobbyists, not professionals.  I'm requesting that attendees be familiar with a language or game making program (Game Maker, Unity, etc.) of their choice before they sign up.  I can probably devote a month to the project (teaching once or twice a week).

What would you want to learn if you were taking such a course for the first time? 

Works great.  Pretty common sense stuff, but for some reason I couldn't get it.  Previously I was limiting the steering angle, not turn speed, at higher speeds.  This basically locked you into a rolling coffin if you went over a certain speed threshold.

Pretty self-explanatory.  I have a kart racer, and I need to limit steering speed and/or angle at higher speeds so the player doesn't twitch out and crash into walls all the time.  I'd like to crib the code from SuperTuxKart, but it's buried somewhere that I can't find.  Any suggestions?

Sounds like Odell Lake to me:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odell_Lake_%28video_game%29

Holy shit, that's it!  So strange to see it again after 20-odd years.

Cannot remember this. Scouring old indiegames blogs and can't find it.


I know it was a pixel-art platformer, which narrows it down a tiny bit.

I think you started out in a village. At some point you revisited the village to go into a house or lighthouse, and then in there you entered some catacombs of sorts. Outside the village was a jungle...I think...and then some sort of castle-y thing, and at the far end was this open desert at evening or night.

There was some osrt of gliding powerup. I just remember the game was very mysterious from what I felt at the time, but I Can't find it.

Sounds like Knytt, or Knytt Stories; there was an umbrella you could use to glide.

Just remembered this mmo I saw a few months/years ago

So many great suggestions...thanks everyone.  That last one is a great example of what I'm trying to avoid.  It has all the features I want - you can breed roosters, catch them in the wild, raise them for different purposes, etc., but the genetics are just bizarre.

Only one gene per attribute is expressed.  The rest are recessive and may be randomly passed to offspring.

The gene for brown feathers has a 15% chance of being expressed, vs. 45% for red.  The gene for red feathers will be expressed much more often, leaving the rest dormant and inactive.

Jesus.  I don't even know what that means, but it sounds like they are describing an epistatic trait, like coat color in labrador retrievers.  In the rooster game, all alternative alleles are present at once,  and have different probabilities of expression.  In real life, only one allele is present at once, but you may need a certain combination of alleles to get a  trait...which is why it looks like there are different probabilities of different traits.

Nothing wrong with that in a game, but seeing the wrong ideas too often can be confusing  (Creatures actually does genetics right, btw).  I'd rather not discuss epistasis at all than confuse people.

This?

That's brilliant.  I would concentrate more on the theory of breeding than on the nitty-gritty details of breeding or caretaking.  But that kind of interface is perfect. 

I looked up the company that produced that game, and they have a lot of other similar simulation games.  Very cool.

You want to build something interesting with the fewest elements possible and then try it out. You'll find what's fun from there.

That reminds me of Jeff Vogel's comment about "design space".  

http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2012/05/legend-of-grimrock-and-design-space.html  

I definitely want to lean more toward the casual gamer, because I'm pretty casual myself and I would get bored by something as involved as Creatures.  If I'm interested in the game, I'll be motivated to add more features while I play & develop it.

Graham, do you have a demo of your project?

isn't it that in breeding humans take on the role of nature, so fitness is a function of how well an individual fullfills the (arbitrary) role we give it. How many seeds it carries, how much milk it gives, how cute it is. We just pick the individuals we'd like to see more of.

Yeah "evolution" just means the relative number of genes in the population has changed.  This can happen by natural selection or by artificial selection.

It would be cool to have in-game wild populations that evolve on their own unless you capture some and domesticate them.  But, yeah, that way lies Dwarf Fortress.

howrse.com
(don't ask me how or why i know about this.)
I think there are some guides on how they do that stuff. It's not terribly deep but i found it interesting.

That's the kind of game I was looking for.  It would be cool to have multiple goals, so you could breed critters for food, leather, show, pit fighting, etc.

Basically, there are a few really crucial concepts that a lot of games miss.  But I think they could be worked into a game without making it incredibly boring:

1. Individuals do not evolve, only populations.  Evolution can't occur within a generation.
2. Evolution is not directed.  There are no "higher" or "lower" organisms.
3. An individual's fitness is a function of their genome and their upbringing. 
4.  Genes are quantized - they don't get diluted after many generations.
5. Evolution doesn't have to involve survival.  It can occur through migration, or by selection for things that don't affect survival (sexual selection).
6. Genotypes affect environment, and vice versa.  If you want a gene for aggression you should look for an organism that has ritualized fighting.  If you want a gene for cold resistance, you should look in polar regions.
7. Evolution occurs at multiple levels (immune system, population, species), and is faster at the lower levels.

A mix of the parents' stats and the child's educator's stats actually.

That's brilliant.  Duly noted.

In Crusader Kings 1 you have to find husbands/wives for yourself and the members of your family and court, and the children's stats are influenced by their parents'. I gather this was possible to game to breed superbeings over several generations, and I don't know if it's still there in Crusader Kings 2.

I would like to introduce the concept of genetics affecting society and vice versa.  Like wolf packs that fall apart and starve because they're too aggressive to cooperate.  Or renaissance noblemen developing a "Habsburg Chin" because the royal families all married their cousins.

you'll have no idea how the new pokemon differs from the parents until you've leveled it up many, many levels.

That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing.  One of the things that drives genetics research is traits that are very valuable, but can't be observed for many years.  Like the quality of the fruit on a tree.  As long as there's a way to research these traits in advance, it can be worth it to spend time figuring them out.

Pokemon's breeding seems to come a little closer to the OP's goal: when two pokemon breed together, the game picks stats from each so the child has one stat calculated from each parent, and will inherit attacks if both parents know it. The majority of the child is generated completely at random, though. You're basically just combining two parents to try to lock in one or two good stats. It's also so painfully opaque that you'd never understand how breeding works without an FAQ explaining it in detail.

Excellent! I didn't realize there was a breeding element in Pokémon, as I just missed that generation.

I don't want to make an accurate genetics simulator. I've written & played those in college and they're not that fun.  I would rather have a game that's fun, introduces a few tricky genetics concepts, and isn't blatantly inaccurate. 

You mentioned that a couple of those games had very mysterious breeding mechanics.  That's actually the kind of behavior I'd want.  You could have some success just by mating similar animals, but at higher levels of play you'd be motivated to know more about the genes involved.

I'm a biologist by training, and I've always wanted to make a game based on population genetics.  I'd like to play some similar games first for research and inspiration, but I  don't know if there are any games that involve breeding.  The only examples I can think of are Harvest Moon and Minecraft that have a very simplified version of it.  There's no goal of "improving" the breed.  Anyone have suggestions?

Here's a stumper...I played an educational game in middle school where you controlled a fish over the course of several seasons.  You had to swim around, eat smaller fish, and surface or dive to avoid various hazards (there was a pike that would eat you if you swam too deep, and a hawk that would catch you if you swam too high).  I think it was turn-based, monochrome, and ran on an early Apple computer.  In the same computer lab we had KidPix and SimAnt, so that should give you an idea of the time period.

Last Christmas I discovered a German board game called "Das Verrückte Labyrinth".  I just got a new job that is forcing me to learn Flash, so I made a video version of it.

http://spaghettilogic.org/labyrinth


On each turn, you slide a row or column of light-grey tiles by clicking & dragging the mouse, then  click  the place where you want your guy to move.  If you touch any goodies on the way, you'll pick them up.  The first person to pick up a majority of the treasure wins.

It's not a faithful adaptation, mainly for ease of programming.  In the original game, there was one extra piece, and you could rotate it whichever way you wanted before inserting it in a row or column. In my version, tiles just slide off one side and on to the other.

My version also generates tiles randomly, not drawn from a distribution as in the board game. This makes it possible to have "crossroad" and "cul-de-sac" chunks, not just t-junctions and l-junctions. This makes the game easier in some ways and harder in others.

Finally, the original gameplay was more like a scavenger hunt. You had a list of items and had to find one at a time.

I listed this as 100% finished because I met all my design goals (I can play it on the couch with my girlfriend as-is).  If I get bored or need a break from other projects, I might add some more features. 

Yeah, I did use the correct name.  I misspelled it in my post above.