Coding Post-mortom

gordallott on 2008/09/14 14:46 of Cine-Science Logic

Well pyweek is over and i thought i would illustrate some of the aspects of coding a game in a week that i think are important in my experiance, some do's an don'ts if you will.

Pyode - ode is a fantastic physics engine, its really quick, its really flexable and its wonderful, but we just didn't *need* to use a physics engine in our game, if i could do it all again i would of used some basic velocities to push the player around and use pyode's collision system, i think some of our stranger bugs could of been weeded out better that way. the gameplay movement dynamics could of been tweeked more as well, as they are they are very 'realistic'

pyOpengl - I'm an opengl coder, its what i do, i love it. pyopengl however is a bit.. special. whereas with C/C++ you just have this basic api where you can load extra function calls, in pyopengl it all falls apart into this python importing fiasco, add to that the fact that pyopengl isn't extreamly well maintained and you get a bit of a mess. a lot of the blackscreen/fullscreen bugs have been caused by that unfortunatly. i would still use pyopengl again as there are no other alternatives (all others use it by proxy) but i would spend more time pre-pyweek figuring out its strangeness.

Inkscape - Using inkscape to design your levels is the best idea anyone could ever have, its a *perfect* 2d layout engine it really really is. the fact that it produces nice xml means that its fairly easy to parse the .svg it produces and load it stright into your game. if it wasn't for the trimesh ode bug in ubuntu we could of done some crazy stuff with convex polgons and everything. if we hadn't of used inkscape we plain couldn't of made our game, thats a fact!

Game dynamics - We didn't figure out our game dynamics until about wednesday and even then its a fairly loose platformer. the string theme took us for a ride a bit as we wern't expecting it. i wrote down some ideas for the various themes before the week started and for the string idea i just had "string physics? endless string that you follow? not much you can do with string physics, its basically as much fun as playing with a bit of string" - so we were sure something else would get picked. booo all you people that voted for string! - if i could do that again i would almost definatly create a smaller gameplay idea and focus on that, a smaller more intimate game with a nice dynamic :)