Artemoids now on Softpedia!

Softpedia logoJust dropping by with a quick note that Artemoids is now available on Softpedia!

I was entirely unaware of this until I received an email this morning telling me as much, and honestly I don’t understand why, but hey! If someone enjoyed it enough to bother submitting it, then I’m not complaining! Then again, it’s listed as a game for Mac, so maybe Macs really are that desperate for entertainment once the thrill goes out of making photo albums and home movies.

Anyway, in celebration of being branded Piemaster Studios without my knowledge, I’ve set up a Piemaster Studios Facebook page so you to can show your support for the fastest-growing independent software developer in the last two hours!

Also good to know is that the extensive codebase of Artemoids was “tested in the Softpedia labs using several industry-leading security solutions and found to be completely clean of adware/spyware components”. So there you go – finally a crappy Java game that you can play in your browser without infecting your computer! Badge displayed proudly below:

Softpedia 100% Clean Award

Introducing: Artemoids

As I mentioned previously, I’m back to work, and my first order of business is playing around with Slick and the Artemis framework. To that end, after a mere day or so of coding, I’m pleased to present Artemoids, a simple Asteroids clone using the Artemis framework. I’ll talk more about the framework soon, but suffice it to say that it is incredible, and exactly what I’ve been looking for on and off over the past couple of years.

So. Artemoids is a simple, top-down 2D game in which you fly a ship around in space (zero gravity) and shoot asteroids. If an asteroid hits your ship you die, and when you shoot an asteroid it splits into two smaller asteroids. That’s pretty much it. There’s really no win/lose conditions, because I don’t intend to make a full game out of it; it’s primarily a test and demo of the Artemis framework, and something easy to cut my teeth on to kick off the holidays.

That said, I am planning a much more sophisticated game with quite a few similarities to Asteroids, so the Artemoids code should serve as a good foundation when I kick that off (and hopefully that will be soon, with an accompanying announcement).

You can try it out for yourself right now in a browser applet, or download a JNLP Java Web Start file to run it a little more locally. I’m quite excited about finally getting both of these deployment methods to work happily, as it means I’ll be significantly more able to show off any future Java projects I create.

Also, notably, this is the first project I’ve ever open-sourced, not because I’ve been a selfish git all this time (well, not only because of that) but because my projects have typically been pretty small-scale and hacked together for personal use. Hopefully however Artemoids (and of the some games that follow) will help to serve as an example for how to use the fledgling Artemis framework, and I’ll be referring to some of my code in future posts/articles. You can check out my Artemoids Bitbucket repository to read the source, submit any issues (bugs/feature requests) you find, or even fork the code for your own project. I’m a big fan of FLOSS, and I’m more than happy to lend a hand to anyone with any interest in what I’m doing.