I mentioned before, I have an idea for a simple game. The idea of it is that player could manufacture own fireworks in the workshop and then fire them away outdoors. Yea, it is far from World of Warcraft but I wanted something simple, fun and suitable for smaller kids also.
Those fireworks rely heavily on particle effects and therefore I started to learn about those. There are some useful examples and a nice particle test bench in the jME. Starting with those I managed to get my fireworks flying pretty easily. I only had to memorize some Newton's laws - shame on me. Other issues were zbuffering and alpha settings but searching jME discussion forums solved that.
After that it was time to add ground and sky. Again, there were examples providing ideas how to do such. This was more or less painless in programming vise but creating nice images of sky with stars caused headache. I used old Bryce 5 which used to work on OS X 10.3 but turned out to be really unstable on OS X 10.4.
Naturally a game needs some sound effects. I searched for suitable free sounds and I added sound playing calls. Again, minor problems as I did not know that volume of the audio clip has to be set explicitly.
At this point I refactored code and modified game to use more modern StandardGame instead of older SimpleGame. I am not sure how important it is to use StandardGame but it was easy to do at this point and I hope it will make switching between workshop and outdoor scenes easier.
