Sunday, May 27, 2007

Pygame

When choosing library for my snake game I decided to use pygame, which is a SDL binding for Python with a bunch of extra game related functionalities.

Why I decided to use this library is mostly because of the fact that as soon as someone in any forum mentions python and game development in the same sentence the phrase "try pygame" has a tendency to follow.

My first impressions of pygame was that it was really handy, everything is quite straightforward and really clean. Setting up the window and drawing some simple graphics is really quick and easy.

But the performance on the other hand is extremely poor, and the only way to get reasonable framerates is by using dirtyrects, and keep optimizing in mind all the time. As soon as bigger parts of the screen needs to be redrawn the fps dropped dramatically. This is a huge pain in the ass in my opinion. I don't think I'll ever use this library for a game again, at least not without combining with opengl or any other library to do the actual drawing.

New Game: Snake

I've been using python as in-game-scripting for some of my projects and the more I've used it the more I've come to like it.

So I thought it'd be nice to write something more than just some little game logic piece in it. Maybe like a little game or something. After some thinking I decided to go for a simplistic snake game since it seemed like a quite small project, and I wouldn't have to worry about performance.

To write this game I decided to use the pygame library, I'll go into more details about this in a future post.

The game took totally about four evenings to write, but the bigger part of the time was spent learning how to use pygame correctly. The two main goals for this game were to get the controls feel quick and responsive and to have working global highscore, I want to believe I achieved them both.

I uploaded it to pjio.com, so feel free to give it a try and you're more than welcome to drop a comment with your opinions.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Highscore

Today I added a global highscore list to my asteroids clone. I think it actually works too, or at least I hope so.

Thursday, May 10, 2007

Back on track

Last post was all about frustration, but now I'm back and more motivated than ever.. kinda. I've got a bunch of new projects ready to get started and I also found some old ones that I had forgotten about. It's not that easy to decide what to spend time on, but I think I'll go on gut feeling and choose what feels right for the moment.

Now it looks like I'll get working on a 2d sidescrolling shmup, but first I'm going to try to get support for python scripting into my game engine.

I'll get back with more information as soon as I've got something to show.

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Frustration

So, yesterday I finished a game for the first time in my life. That's great and all but now I'm all restless, but has no project to work on. With every good thing there's a downside...

I have tried to come up with some new idea but I just haven't been able to catch enough inspiration yet. But I guess it'll sort itself out soon, otherwise I'll soon be insane..

Saturday, May 5, 2007

Asteroids clone

Here's my asteroids clone, with a little help from pjio.com

Click here if your browser makes a mess of the layout and hides half the game..

First entry..

For the first time in my life I actually finished a game project. This is kind of a big thing for me since I normally get bored and start developing something new when I've finished the actual gameplayt. So to celebrate I decided to start this blog where I could keep track of progress and post my future games.

The game that I've been talking about is an Asteroids clone written in c++ with help of opengl for graphics and audiere for sound. It's far from perfect, but atlest I made it.. ;)

Wanna give it a try?