http://www.brainfold.org/blog On Python, game development and everything Fri, 03 Oct 2008 10:11:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I've actually been working on a game in secret! It's not Artillery Brawl, because it's a card game. A real paper and cardboard game with custom cards. The advantage is that implementation is a lot simpler than for a computer game, which is good considering my limited free time at ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/10/03/secrets/ Looks like my disappearance for the summer is becoming an annual event. :) Unfortunately, the only thing I have to report is that I still have too much work with studies, my part-time job and some other stuff to have any left for game development at the moment. I still ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/09/22/unfortunately/ Oops, looks like Real Life ate me for July. I haven't even worked on the university project much, but I'll have to get it ready before September. Some good news regarding my studies though: I'm very likely to finish all my remaining courses during the next academic year. After that, ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/08/05/summer/ Finish these stupid courses - I have to use Java again for the other one, eww Prototype a game idea I had while driving home today - but not spend over a week on it Learn to draw some vector art - because it should be easier for "programmer art" than pixels Get ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/07/08/i-want-to/ Lately I've read a lot about game design (Danc's blog has been especially enlightening). I'm now convinced I have to prototype a few "risky" aspects of Artillery Brawl's gameplay to make sure what I'm doing is actually fun before wasting effort on other parts of the game. The core gameplay of ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/07/05/artillery-brawl-prototyping/ I'm starting to write about the game design for Artillery Brawl on this blog instead of keeping it in my head and my private wiki. As opposed to Red Nebula, whose concept is wide open, a "playground" of sorts, the vision I have for Artillery Brawl is very focused, and ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/07/02/artillery-brawl-the-concept/ Today I adapted the nice setuptools-based plugin module from Spineless to more easily support different physics toolkits in my code, and played around a bit trying to write a Box2D plugin. Frankly, I don't like the Box2D API design at all, and I like the pyBox2D API even less, as ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/07/01/box-of-horrors/ My work with the entity system is pretty much finished for now. Everything seems to be finally working and the code is reasonably clean. I don't want to get stuck polishing the code while it's still missing most of the planned features. I didn't get to gameplay / user interface ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/06/30/bullet-through-the-wall/ Yet more entities The entity system overhaul is almost finished. Everything looks all right now, but doesn't really behave... there must still be some bugs left in the physics system. I'll concentrate on bug hunting and cleanup tomorrow, and hope to get to gameplay as well, next week if not tomorrow. ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/06/29/final-stretch/ Entity system Today I've continued work under the hood, on the entity system. Both components and entity types are now loaded using the plugin / entry point system of setuptools, which means custom components and units will be really easy to create and distribute. And much easier for me to load. ... http://www.brainfold.org/blog/2008/06/28/entities-ahoy/