Game Development Resources (updated 2018-12-09)

richard on 2011/08/10 03:37
— edited on 2018/12/08 22:42

The following are resources you might find useful in developing games:


On frame rates, vsync and gameplay simulation.

Great video about good game design as illustrated by the Mega Man series (caution: contains swearing)

Content Creation

Turns out you can do most things with asynchronous Python and SVG! Turberfield utilities library (docs, demo).

Resources
  • Icons for eveything - royalty free icons (over 1 million, it claims)
  • /r/gamedev often has free game assets and other resources (though much of the content is about money using games).

If you have anything you think should be added to this list, please let me know in a comment!

When you're ready to promote your game, here's some tips on making an entertaining and engaging video game trailer.

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Comments

Tee on 2011/08/13 00:20:

It's hard not to add this awesome link.

Pixel Prospector's Indie Resources

superjoe on 2011/08/23 14:23:

Email I got:


Hi
 I'm interested in providing music for games created during pyweek. All I ask is for a text link back to websites from the hackers who use my music or effects.
 The link should be like so:

 <a href="http://www.inkaudio.com"> royalty free music by inkaudio </a>

 Let me know if you're interested. you can check out samples here : http://www.inkaudio.com,  I have hundreds more.

Thanks.
 

richard on 2011/11/04 01:23:

Added a link to a great video about good game design as illustrated by the Mega Man series (contains swearing.)

Cosmologicon on 2012/04/09 19:34:

Along the lines of "how to succeed/fail at Pyweek", one great resource is postmortem posts on this discussion board. You can find a bunch with a search for "postmortem", or if you find a game you like, look through its diary entries for a postmortem.

Willyfrog on 2012/05/04 22:35:

If you liked pixotello, you'll probably like "http://danikgames.com/stuff/pyxeledit/"

richard on 2012/05/05 00:05:

Oh, Willyfrog, you just made my day! :-)

richard on 2012/05/25 01:24:

Nice writeup of various approaches to 2D platformer games.

richard on 2012/05/29 03:16:

"Juice It Or Lose It" - an awesome presentation about making games more fun with very simple ideas.

richard on 2012/05/30 01:49:

"Designing a retro pixel-art tile-set" looks like a great tutorial.

richard on 2012/07/31 00:10:

Added Al Sweigert's Video Game Mechanics Mixer.

richard on 2012/07/31 00:16:

Also added link to the awesome Pyxeledit which replaces Pixothello.

john on 2012/09/14 07:01:

I've found Amitp's website particularly interesting myself, it gives plenty of advice on topics such as pathfinding and procedurally landscape generation amongst others.

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html

richard on 2012/09/17 05:12:

Added, thanks john!

Strings on 2012/09/22 16:10:

Better late than never:

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134273/evaluating_game_mechanics_for_depth.php?print=1
This article is probably one of the most useful I've ever read and is great for evaluating whether a game idea is good or not in advance.

And if you're interested in game development or the industry around it, you need to watch all of this:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits

Just all of it.

Neutron01 on 2013/03/24 17:12:

Thanks guys, I was searching fro these types of resources.

richard on 2013/03/25 02:48:

Added a link to Kivy.

justinmeister on 2014/04/12 00:21:

Mekire's github account is full of great example code for pygame projects.  I'd suggest checking them out, especially the pygame concept examples:

[Mekire's github](https://github.com/Mekire?tab=repositories)

justinmeister on 2014/04/12 00:22:

Whoops, I thought the forum used markup.  My mistake.

https://github.com/Mekire?tab=repositories

richard on 2014/04/22 09:46:

Added Game Mechanics Explorer (thanks reidrac) and a Whole Lot of PyGame Examples (thanks justinmeister).

superpws on 2014/04/30 15:40:

You should link to Panda3D in libraries.

ikanreed on 2014/05/16 00:08:

So, um, I've been working on, recentlyish, a multiplayer data synchronization layer to make seamless and transparent data-model synchronization possible. It just lets you kind of just "check in" objects to keep synced to a server that sends those changes to all clients on background threads.

Is anyone interested in me polishing that up to redistributable quality for next pyweek?

richard on 2014/05/16 00:58:

Sounds neat, and possibly with applications outside of gaming. Publish to PyPI! :)

ikanreed on 2014/05/16 01:04:

Okay, I guess look to see it out there by end of next month? I'm sure I'll post again, if I ever actually get it to where I'm not scared of making someone's life harder instead of easier.

B3nac on 2014/09/08 02:45:

Is it ok if I use my Github Repo as a resource/reference? I wont be using the logic just the code as reference. https://github.com/B3nac/SpaceRiot0.0.2

richard on 2014/09/11 01:13:

Added the random music generator at fakemusicgenerator.com

knowledge on 2014/09/22 20:40:

Please add Teamups

cbrocGames on 2014/10/01 00:17:

I know this might cause some controversy, but TkInter can be quite useful if you know it well, and it has a lot to offer.

gizmo_thunder on 2015/03/25 17:45:

Can we use GoDot engine?.. http://www.godotengine.org/wp/ it uses GDScript which is same as python.. This will be good for people who are just getting started in game dev and will be very helpful for developing under strict deadlines..

richard on 2015/04/20 09:20:

@gizmo nah, it's neat but it's not Python. The godot folk have their own challenge you could enter - and I imagine godot would be permissible in LD48 as well.

reidrac on 2015/05/13 07:06:

Can you add my pysdl2 harness?

pysdl2-harness, it is just some simple classes to make working with pysdl2 easier. Somewhat inspired by pyglet and trying to hide all the "ugly" stuff of SDL2 and mainly focused in the type of 2D games I like ;).

It is pretty much a work in progress, but I'm getting close to make a first release. I'm making an example game with it and implementing any feature I think it needs./p>

reidrac on 2015/05/31 09:26:

I made a first (accidental) public release and now harness is on PyPi: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pysdl2-harness

I Haven't finished the example game, but I think it is small and simple enough to grasp it without too much trouble.

I may add things in the future (and contributions are welcome!), but so far I think it hast mostly what I would need to make a simple 2D game.

tundish on 2015/06/01 14:59:

I've been working a lot recently on how to make interactive hypertext games without all that tedious mucking about in Javascript. Turns out you can do most things with asynchronous Python and SVG! Here's a link to the Turberfield utilities library: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/turberfield-utils Docs are here (since early April): http://pythonhosted.org/turberfield-utils/ Also a blog article with a bit more background: http://hwit.org/scalable-design-is-within-grasp.html And a demo of asynchronous Python + web SVG: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/turberfield-machina I know it's not everyone's idea of a game environment, but if you fancy giving this approach a go, I'll be available during PyWeek to give technical support.

tundish on 2015/06/01 15:05:

Please ignore/delete my preceding post: bad formatting, sorry.

I've been working a lot recently on how to make interactive hypertext games without all that tedious mucking about in Javascript. Turns out you can do most things with asynchronous Python and SVG!

Here's a link to the Turberfield utilities library: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/turberfield-utils

Docs are here (since early April): http://pythonhosted.org/turberfield-utils/

Also a blog article with a bit more background: http://hwit.org/scalable-design-is-within-grasp.html

And a demo of asynchronous Python + web SVG: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/turberfield-machina

I know it's not everyone's idea of a game environment, but if you fancy giving this approach a go, I'll be available during PyWeek to give technical support.

richard on 2016/08/28 23:05:

Thanks for the suggested additions, redirac and tundish!

mauve on 2017/02/13 08:11:

/r/gamedev often has free game assets and other resources (though much of the content is about money using games).


In Pyweek 21 we made much use of Red Blob Games, which has superb interactive tuto

cprogrammer1994 on 2017/06/14 17:35:

Hello, I want to introduce ModernGL a PyOpenGL replacement. I hope it will be useful during the next challenge.

Here is the documentation.


I prepared some examples:


Please feel free to contribute.

mauve on 2017/11/02 09:19:

Google Poly 

YannThor on 2018/07/24 23:02:

Hello,


I frequently use thorpy (www.thorpy.org) to make GUI for my games with pygame.

Also, I'm developing PyMap2d for generation and rendering of 2d maps. Depending on the theme of the next challenge, I may use it. You can find the code with 3 examples maps at https://github.com/YannThorimbert/PyMap2D.

Cheers,


Yann

mauve on 2018/12/08 10:10:

https://thenounproject.com/ - royalty free icons (over 1 million, it claims)

richard on 2018/12/08 22:41:

Thanks, folks! Added all the things except Google Poly because I'm not sure it's that useful - from skimming and checking a bunch of entries people are using it as an art gallery for 3d artworks and scenes, with very few object downloads. Perhaps it's useful for inspiration in some cases?

mauve on 2018/12/09 08:57:

No, Poly is great. Browsing from the front page it shows a lot of tours and Tilt Brush junk, but if you search you can find loads of low-poly CC-BY models. eg.

mit-mit got several of the models from The Desert And The Sea from Google Poly.

mauve on 2018/12/09 23:51:

CC0Textures.com - public domain PBR texture sets