Current projects

It’s about time I started blogging about my game projects. As part of a research semester for my study I’m building some prototype games to explore game development in Python. Our first one, Pyrio, is already done and turned out to be quite nice. The second, tank-battle, is lagging a bit behind our own expectations but is nevertheless quite nice, though I don’t plan to do all the packaging stuff for this one.

Pyrio is a Mario clone. It uses graphics and sounds from Secret Maryo Chronicals and is written with Pygame. One of our findings was that rendering with Pygame was much to slow so for Tank-battle we started using Cocos2d / Pyglet. Tank-battle is not really a game but more a tech-demo. It plays with networking and AI. The networking part is built on top of Twisted and works quite well. We even built some interpolation code on the client which makes prevents opponents from jittering around the screen. We are now in the process of building some path finding into some computer players and make them do smart things. But time is almost up as tomorrow will be the last day of development and we ain’t got anything battle related, so it’s just tanks for now ;-)

In the upcoming weeks we will build a 3D prototype, participate in the Pyweek and further develop our Pyweek game afterwards. In the meantime, try Pyrio ;-)