Gday all,

I am bursting with ideas for games... ranging from simple to complex... 2d to 3d... arcade to action to rpg...

I am an aerospace engineer by trade and have programmed in the past in matlab and finite element packages... I am also highly capable at maths, as it is the basis of what I do for a living...

I am currently learning python so I can write apps for solving differential equations relevant to work... so far its fairly simple but I assume it'll get worse lol...

To the point, I've got my hands on blender, panda3d and a few other apps, and I'm quite experienced in modelling (parts and aircraft mainly in cad software). I wish to put it to you all, as a first exercise I'm keen to make a 2d game... what do can you recommend for me in terms of tutorials, references and stuff? I am keen to make like simple tank game... what tools etc do I need? Can i do it in python?

That's about it... I am now at your mercy... be gentle...


PS: as a bonus the more help you can provide the better a tutorial I can submit based on my own experience... Cheers...

You can certainly use Python to develop 2D games. PyGame is a simple and well-respected library for game development in Python - in fact, I would go so far as to say that Python with PyGame is as close as anything else to an ideal choice for a beginner to game development. It allows you to get started by loading an image and drawing it to the screen with minimal hassle. It also handles things like player input via keyboard, mouse or any other controller in a straightforward way




I would recommend getting a decent working knowledge of Python to begin with - learn to use tuples, lists, dictionaries etc. Become familiar with control structures (loops and conditionals). Learn what a class is and how to work with them.




The next step is to get a basic understanding of how a simple game might operate under the hood. In its simplest form, a game is an infinite loop which performs the following steps with each iteration:

• Check for input (usually from the player, but it could be the operating system sending a signal asking the program to exit for example)
• Update the game state based on this input and any other rules (such as AI or physics) - you'll need some way to represent the state of the game, which might be as simple as a list of game objects, each with an associated position, orientation, health points etc
• Draw some representation of the game state to the screen

Here each loop iteration corresponds with one "frame" as observed by the player.




There are an abundance of decent tutorials available - check out pygame.org - This looks like a good starting point

Thanks alot! Nice detailed response... much appreciated... I will update in a few weeks with progress and maybe a short guide for beginners based on how I started...

Cheers
sladuh

Check out thenewbostons tutorials for pygame on youtube..

Cheers for the link crazycode... thinking I will attempt a rehash of syndicate once I have a clue how...

Hey one last thing...

Python and menus and GUIs...

Anyone have a reference to say a tutorial on creating a main menu, and sub menus... and tying in menu inputs to change graphical settings, volume of the sound etc...

And one final one... saving and loading games... recording highscores etc...

Chances are once I have learnt enough python ill be able to figure it out but a few tutorials or references always come in handy...

Cheeries
sladuh