Game Architecture and Workflow

We keep the JavaFX convention to append App after the class containing main(). So if your game name is "MyGame" then the class that has main() should be called MyGameApp.

Entity Types

Most games will have different types of entities, e.g. player, bullet, enemy, etc. The type is likely to be an enum, so it might look like this:

public enum EntityType {
    PLAYER, BULLET, ENEMY
}

Instead of EntityType you can also put MyGameNameType depending on what suits you better. For example, for a Space Invaders clone I used SpaceInvadersType name for the enum.

Entity Factory

It is recommended that you have a single class responsible for creating entities per collective types in your game. For example, you might create a class for creating enemies only, then a class to create powerups only, and maybe another class for creating specifically background and decor entities. Such a class for creating entities is called an entity factory.

public class MyBlockFactory implements EntityFactory {

    @Spawns("block")
    public Entity newBlock(SpawnData data) {
        return Entities.builder()
                .from(data)
                .viewFromNode(new Rectangle(70, 70))
                .build();
    }
}

You can add a factory to the game world as follows: getGameWorld().addEntityFactory(new MyBlockFactory());. Then you can spawn an entity, using getGameWorld().spawn("block");, which in turn calls your factory method annotated with @Spawns("block").

Game Config

Game config is a file config.kv (placed under /assets/kv/) that contains values that affect the game / gameplay. For example, the config may contain values of type int, double, boolean and String:

maxEnemies = 50
bulletSpeed = 1.5
spawnPowerups = true
defaultName = some string text here

You will then need to create a data structure class as follows:

public class Config {
    private int maxEnemies;

    public int getMaxEnemies() {
        return maxEnemies;
    }

    ...
}

Set your class as follows:

settings.setConfigClass(Config.class);

Finally, you can access your data object (with all the fields appropriately populated) by calling (Config) FXGL.getGameConfig().

Level Building

Building Levels - in short, use .txt for very simple levels, use Tiled editor for anything else.