Last semester I took Game Theory, an independent study with 5 others. I decided to give another shot at Java game development.
So, I present to you (unfinished) ZombieSkater! Coded by Ray Dehler, levels by Kim Head and artwork by Chuck McKenzie. There are 13 levels hard coded, and I can only beat 5!
The idea was to make a puzzle type game where a player must keep track of moves in synchronous order in a sort of Chip’s Challenge-esque fashion (but with only ice). Thus the player must view the board, make a series of look-aheads, and act accordingly.
The last official work on the game was done Dec-08-2005, just before Christmas break. It works while running from the Eclipse IDE, and when running the applet locally, but when loading the applet from a website not preceeded by “file://”, the following error occurs:
Exception in thread "Thread-205" java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: input == null!
at javax.imageio.ImageIO.read(Unknown Source)
at ZombieSkater.createSquare(ZombieSkater.java:307)
at ZombieSkater.loadLevel(ZombieSkater.java:1960)
at ZombieSkater.startNewLevel(ZombieSkater.java:533)
at ZombieSkater.run(ZombieSkater.java:582)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)
At the time I racked my brain, and I finally gave up. Since then (4+ months later), I’ve made no contributions and don’t plan to make anymore contributions to this. That being the case, I’ve decided to publish what I have, and let creative and interested minds have at it.
At first I thought it was a permissions issue, thinking that I would have to sign the Applet, or something to that effect. Then I noticed that Eclipse had this for the “java.policy.applet” file:
/* AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED ON Tue Apr 16 17:20:59 EDT 2002*/
/* DO NOT EDIT */
grant {
permission java.security.AllPermission;
};
Which supposedly means that it has full access.
The error makes me think that the way I load images is the issue. I tried a couple of ways (which you can see in the code). I ended up using “ImageIO.read()” to grab the ImageIcon because I found it online, but another example uses “Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().createImage()”. So if someone were to troubleshoot this further, that is what I would suggest looking at first.
In any case, here it is. I coded it with Eclipse, and make sure that you set the size to 600×600 when you run it as an applet.
Download file:
ZombieSkater.zip (2.22MB; 114 downloads)
Please let me know if you make any contributions to it, and I will link to it, or update my copy.
There are also a series of screenshots that I captured:
