Chapter 4 ■ an IntroduCtIon to Game desIGn: Game desIGn ConCepts, Genres, enGInes, and teChnIques
Dynamic Games: Arcade, Shooter, Platform, and Action Games
Dynamic games could be termed Action Games or Arcade Games and include a lot of movement on
the display screen. These highly dynamic games almost always involve shooting things, such as in first-
person shooters (Doom and Half-Life, for instance) as well as in third-person shooters (Resident Evil and
Grand Theft Auto) genres, or stealing things or evading scary things. Action sports games, such as football,
soccer, baseball, basketball, golf, and lacrosse, are also very popular in the dynamic games genre, and
they are almost always created using a photorealistic, i3D virtual world or virtual reality game simulation
environment. Driving games are another incarnation of this genre and also tend to use real-time i3D game
rendering technologies to provide the driver with an ultrarealistic driving simulation.
There is also the obstacle course navigation paradigm, such as commonly seen in platformer games
such as Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, or Super Mario Brothers. Platformer games are often arcade games, which
are typically 2D or 2.5D, which is called isometric. The arcade game ZAXXON was a great example of an
isometric game that was 2D, and looked 3D, or Tempest, where geometric shapes climbed up a geometric
well where the player shot down the side to prevent the climbing shapes from reaching the top.
It’s important to note that any genre of game can be produced using 2D or 3D graphic assets or can even
be produced using a combination of 2D and 3D assets, which is allowed by JavaFX 9.0 and which I would
term a hybrid.
Hybrid Games: An Opportunity to Leverage JavaFX Creatively
From a JavaFX Scene Graph assets perspective, a hybrid game would be one that used both 2D and 3D
assets, most of which we covered in Chapters 2 and 3. There is another type of hybrid, which could span
different game genres, which we just covered some of in the previous section. There are so many popular
game types that there is always a fantastic opportunity to create an entirely new genre of game by using a
hybrid gameplay approach. For instance, imagine taking some of the characteristics from a static (strategic)
game type, such as a board game, and adding elements of a dynamic (action) game type. A good example of
this would be Battle Chess, where chess pieces do battle to the death when they come into each other’s chess
board square.
In my Beginning Java 8 Games Development (Apress, 2014), I used JavaFX 8.0 to create a hybrid game
engine that has support for attributes of a platformer game, a shooter game, and a treasure hunting game. As
you can see in Figure 4-4, the BagelToons InvinciBagel game engine created in that book, where I cover i2D
games development, has elements normally found in different types of 2D games, including superheroes,
enemies, shooting, treasures, obstacles, hiding places, buildings, cars, landscaping, magic carpet cats, safe
cracking, food, and the like.