New Project: DNJNLY
Post date: 03-Aug-2011 23:05:13
Like most things, programming is something you learn by doing. With that in mind, I'm embarking on a project to teach my friend Peter some programming skills the most entertaining way I can think of - by writing a game. Game Idea: DNJNLY
DNJNLY, or 'Dungeonly' was inspired by researching 'Roguelike' games, and Desktop Dungeons. It looked like one of those deceptively simple game ideas - something easy to make a basic version of, but with lots of opportunities for complexity.
Language: Python
My language of choice for this project is Python, for a couple of reasons. Python combines great readability with great library support, meaning that we'll be able to build quickly and easily, while experiment along the way.
Library: PyGame
Particularly, we'll be making the most of PyGame, the famous Python library wrapped around SDL. PyGame has a strong established community, and is particularly friendly to newbies, so it's perfect for our purposes.
Tool: Google Docs
Something people often underestimate when building games is the amount data involved. To keep manage and share our level assets and other structured data, we'll be trying Google Docs.
We'll need something to keep track of our code and art assets, particularly because we're working from different countries (The Netherlands and Australia.) Google Code has served me well in the past for basic Subversion project hosting, and TortoiseSVN is a solid, newbie-friendly tool for accessing Subversion. (For a more advanced project I'd probably use Git/Github, but I find that a little less friendly to new users.)