I have been working with pygame lately and have found out that OpenGL is the best if you don't want to handle integer based screen blitting stuff. As for me i have managed to get a small game running. This is still a work in progress so i am looking for feedback so as to change it. Currently it looks ok to me.
If you are wondering why pocket tanks??? well.. the idea of sliding land looked cool to me.. wondered how it could have been done.. quite simple.. drop the pixels in each column. That is as simple as it gets. This is very easy to do in pygame. So i managed to get it right. The only problem i faced was managing the tanks when land below them is changing. You know the land sliding.. etc.. Well any way i still need to add scoring system, artwork for weapons, was wondering about incorporating multiplayer. Could be tricky but have to think about it.
For the first time i realized how important it is to design the code structure before hand. Unlike my other games, i started off designing this as a simple understand while you do kinda of program. So i really did not give much thought about how the structure was. No doubt i was using python and it had classes.. but i was using global variables and that caused a major problem when i wanted to structure the code into multiple files. One single file looks elegant from outside .. you know .. the.. strange.. "WHOLE GAME IN ONE FILE" kinda feeling but.. it really is hard to manage such code. Still some major drawbacks in the structure but i hope i will be able to manage without any major design changes.
As usual the art work has taken quite some time away from the development time. Just to get the feel of what's going on ... you need to have some artwork ready. Cubes and Rectangles are good, but the way it looks after it has some objects in it is very important.
If you are wondering why pocket tanks??? well.. the idea of sliding land looked cool to me.. wondered how it could have been done.. quite simple.. drop the pixels in each column. That is as simple as it gets. This is very easy to do in pygame. So i managed to get it right. The only problem i faced was managing the tanks when land below them is changing. You know the land sliding.. etc.. Well any way i still need to add scoring system, artwork for weapons, was wondering about incorporating multiplayer. Could be tricky but have to think about it.
For the first time i realized how important it is to design the code structure before hand. Unlike my other games, i started off designing this as a simple understand while you do kinda of program. So i really did not give much thought about how the structure was. No doubt i was using python and it had classes.. but i was using global variables and that caused a major problem when i wanted to structure the code into multiple files. One single file looks elegant from outside .. you know .. the.. strange.. "WHOLE GAME IN ONE FILE" kinda feeling but.. it really is hard to manage such code. Still some major drawbacks in the structure but i hope i will be able to manage without any major design changes.
As usual the art work has taken quite some time away from the development time. Just to get the feel of what's going on ... you need to have some artwork ready. Cubes and Rectangles are good, but the way it looks after it has some objects in it is very important.
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