Bill Seitz wrote:
I'd like to get my sons (age 10 and 8) programming, but the only hook that I think will get them started is the ability to make a kinda cool game.
Probably true.
Ideally, I'd like to see a tutorial that leads them down the path of making a starter non-lame game. A specific example I've found, for Flash-based games, is at the KongregateLabs site: http://www.kongregate.com/labs
Thanks for pointing this out. I've thought about learning Flash now and then, but never found a tutorial as good as this one.
Can PyGame achieve the same thing? Are there any existing tutorials or projects that cover similar material?
I'm not sure, as I'm still rather new to PyGame myself. I do know that I personally haven't seen a PyGame tutorial as good as this one.
I also wonder about the performance -- I think Adobe has put a lot of effort into squeeing performance out of Flash. It wouldn't surprise me if they're using OpenGL under the hood (at least on OS X) to get the good performance that they do. The game in this tutorial (as well as pretty much any other side-scrolling game) requires refreshing the whole game screen every second, which they manage to do at 30 fps. Of course it's only a 600x300 screen, so maybe this could be done in software.
Still, I'd love to see somebody borrow the Shootorial resources and basically translate that tutorial into Python/PyGame. This would give us a really nice side-by-side comparison, in terms of both development effort and performance.
Best, - Joe