The Road to Pyweek -- Progress and a Side Project

Akake on 2009/03/28 21:12 of The Laser Samurai

My first pracrtice game is starting to come together a bit.
I have most of the images for the terrain made (144 out of 208).

A far as the code goes:
I have:
-I have the basic entity mechanics coded
-I also have the level loader well underway
-I have designed the level loader to optimize the level terrain as it loads the level, so that instead of hundreds of Rects to check collisions for, I only have about twenty or thirty, and maybe fifty or sixty at the absolute worst
-I have a factory coded that will be able to make any kind of object, according to a template that it can either make and store, or use temporarily to make a single object
-I have the code broken into several files for the sake of organization (One of the biggest mistakes I made last pyweek was to put everything in one file)

I don't have:
-I don't have the enemy AI coded
-I don't have most of the game flow code written, including a scene manager
-I don't have a menu system written
-I don't have a system for player preferences

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I'm still chipping away at the project, but I have the boilerplate classes done, and a bit of the game's logic.

I'm writing the code to be as reusable as possible, because I'm also working on a game engine at the moment.

The engine is called Peachy Keen. It will provide an in-depth, extensible framework for platform games, and also for entity, image, save game, and other storage using a dialect of XML I'm currently designing: Peachy Keen Markup Language (PKML). It will (hopefully) be in a working state before the next Pyweek, but it is a big project.

The objective of Peachy Keen is to simultaneously provide a way for simple platforming games to be written almost entirely in XML, and also give competent Python scripters a framework to build on to make their own games.

The project takes its name from the fact that its method of handling graphics (A sort of XML-based compressed bitmapping) lends itself to games with a look and feel similar to beloved shareware titles such as Jill of the Jungle, Charlie the Duck, and, the game's namesake Commander Keen.

The projects Google Code page: http://code.google.com/p/peachykeen/

(Sorry if the link doesn't work, I'm not sure how to work HTML... You may need to copy/paste)