[pygame] Re: Working on Retro 80s Game SDK, Looking for general support

[The Music Guy <musicguy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Good point. I was sort of thinking the same thing, actually. I don't
think I'll be able to start testing anything, though, until I have a
basic world editor ready, otherwise it will be very difficult to
create any test levels.

On Jan 6, 5:39 pm, Casey Duncan <ca...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On piece of advice I have is to create actual games with the system as  
> early as possible, especially before the apis and features have  
> completely solidified. It's very helpful to point out awkward or  
> missing parts of the system.
>
> -Casey
>
> On Jan 6, 2009, at 4:23 PM, The Music Guy wrote:
>
> > Hello all,
>
> > There are two purposes to this message:
> > 1.) To test my recent subscription to the Pygame mailing list, and
> > 2.) To announce that I am working on a game SDK that is similar (in
> > some ways) to Pgu.
>
> > My SDK is called "Scrollback," abbreviated "sbak". At the moment, my
> > it is still just a library and is about 70% through the alpha stages.
> > It's developed enough that one could make some relatively simple games
> > with it, but very little of the API is actually nailed down yet.
> > (That's one of the things I am posting about.)
>
> > The main goals of my SDK are, in order of importance:
>
> >   1. To be an all-in-one 8- and 16-bit era game SDK.
> >   2. To remain as OS-independent as possible.
> >   3. To be easy for people with little or no experience making games
> > to get a quick start.
> >   4. To be easy for beginning and novice programmers to begin using.
> >   5. To take advantage of the Python programming language.
> >   6. To rely on as few external libraries as possible, even if it
> > means including 3rd-party libraries with the main package
> > distribution.
>
> > As you can see, the main theme for my SDK is availablility rather than
> > speed, as in many other game SDKs.
>
> > Some of the ideas of Scrollback are inspired by Game Maker, though
> > Scrollback is far from being a GM clone. I once had a near-guru level
> > of experience with GM, but since switching exclusively to Linux, GM is
> > no longer much of an option. I hear a lot of people have this problem,
> > including Mac users, so I decided to try and do something about it.
> > While I was at it, I decided to add some features to the mix which I
> > have felt GM has always needed.
>
> > Though I was good with GM, I'm not generally a very good programmer,
> > and I'm going to need a lot of help, otherwise I could see this
> > project taking decades to complete by myself. Incidentally, I've been
> > trying to start projects like this off and on for the last few years,
> > but kept having to start over. Now it seems I'm finally getting
> > somewhere, and I don't want to have to start over again.
>
> > I'm going through some issues with my web host right now (trying to
> > get mod_wsgi activated) otherwise I would have a wiki up with as much
> > information about this project as I have. Until I can start the wiki,
> > here are some of the most prominent features planned, subject to
> > change at any time:
>
> > Features which are presently implemented either in part or in full:
>
> > * "Images", basically a kind of object which can be drawn to a
> > surface, but has a built-in offset that is applied every draw.
> > * "Composites", which are clusters of Images that are drawn together
> > as a stack of layers.
> > * "Animations", which are clusters of Images that are each drawn
> > separately at different times as "frames", where each frame may be
> > displayed for a varying length of time.
> > * "Worlds", which are basically planes that contain tile maps and
> > "entities"
> > * "Entities" are the physical objects which interact with each other.
> > These would be things like the player, enemies, projectiles, item
> > pickups, doors, etc.
> > * "Cameras" that can view worlds and follow particular entities
> > * Parallaxed backgrounds (buggy at present, but usable)
> > * "Tile maps" are basically grids of numbers which refer to "tile"
> > descriptions in "tile lists"
> > * Collision detection between entities and between entities and tile
> > maps.
> > * A "tile list" is what most would describe as a "tileset", but may
> > use Images, Composites, or Animations as the visual component of
> > tiles. Additionally, each tile has user-defined data added to them,
> > including groups that the tiles may be added to and attribute=value
> > pairs.
> > * XML-based file formats for defining objects of any of the types of
> > object described above (with the exception of entities)
> > * A very simplistic event manager allowing functions to be associated
> > with pygame.event events
> > * A customizable user input (UI) system that uses the event manager
> > described above
> > * Wrappers for many of the pygame.draw function which draw to the
> > screen when to surface is given
> > * Text-drawing functions for both single- and multi-lined strings
> > * A textbox system for making textboxes like those in Final Fantasy,
> > Mega Man X, etc. Supports CSS-like styling, automatic word wrapping,
> > and pagifying text. (still early in development)
> > * A simple resource file management system (this took a while to make,
> > and still has a few oddities)
> > * All-in-one engine for updating and drawing worlds and entities,
> > similar to the one in Game Maker, but most easily custimizable.
>
> > Features that are planned but not implemented yet:
>
> > * Semi-WYSIWYG editors for tilesets, tilemaps, images, worlds,
> > animations, composites, and possibly other things.
> > * Saving of certain resource file types.
> > * Drop-in physics code for platformer-type games
> > * Capability to link worlds together to make "super worlds"
> > * Support for positional sound
> > * Support for tracked music in formats like
> > * Textbox-based menus for making selections with the keyboard or mouse
> > * Implementation of critical modules in C to improve speed.
> > * Some kind of online multiplayer support
>
> > As you can see, I'm being very ambitious with this, but the project is
> > getting really big and I think I need some help. I'm open to any
> > suggestions and advice from people who have developed games before.
> > --
> >http://Alphaios.net- Tracked Module Music, Blog, and Links.