Re: [pygame] award winning pygames.

["Patrick Mullen" <saluk64007@xxxxxxxxx>]

In my opinion, pygame is fairly easy to learn/use.  This is a double
edged sword when it comes to how it looks from the outside.  Tools
that are hard to use generally require very dedicated people to be
able to be productive with them at all.  By the time a developer has
jumped through the hurdles to get started, assuming that development
does get easier as time goes on, said developer might be more likely
to have the dedication required to finish a game.  On the other hand,
with something like python/pygame, getting started might be so easy as
to delude someone into thinking that finishing a game will now
magically be "easy" because the tool was so easy to learn.  I have
seen this same problem with other tools that are easy to learn.
Getting started may be shorter, but finishing is just as hard as
finishing ALWAYS is.

Pyweek is a good example of this.  Maybe half of the games in each
competition I would say have the potential to be somewhat successful,
at least as successful as other indie games could be.  But very very
few of these games ever get developed further after pyweek.  Actually
developing one of those games into a full commercial or popular game
could take many more months of development even if it seems complete
after that week.

To sum up, even finishing a game, especially when working alone as
most pygame developers do, requires a huge amount of patience and
dedication, even though the tool is very good and makes many things
easy.  The tool is only half the battle in making a good game.  My
problem is that I basically only work on games with the kind of
dedication required during pyweeks, after which I am very lazy and
never manage to finish anything.  Plus most of my game development
energy is put into my mmorpg which is such a huge project I don't know
when I will ever finish.  If I could spend a few months with the
energy I put into each pyweek on a single game, I think I could pump
out many at least "able to be successful" games each year.  Lord knows
I have enough ideas.  I just don't have that kind of energy or I use
it up in other places.  I think many others in the community could do
the same.  Unfortunately most of us are doing this as a hobby, and
we're a small community besides, hence the small amount of
"successful" games.  However you measure success.