Thanks for the replies, I think that many of you get where I am going with this. If there already is a solution out there I would be more then happy to use it, it’s just that I have not found one yet.

But I think that you have the main idea, something that would take care of all of the repetitive coding one has to do when starting a new game. Something that would let new users, or students, quickly and easily create something. Something that would let those of us interested in making games actually get down to the task of creating the actual game. One idea that I would like to include, if people are interested in pursuing this with me, is a level editor of some sort. Python is such a fantastically dynamic language that you could do a lot with a level editor beyond the simple placement of graphics.

Personally I don’t know that much about game engine design beyond the simple stuff, but if people are interested I’m sure that we could learn as we went.

So keep commenting and letting me know what you think. I think I might work on a longer post outlining some of my ideas (I mean we’d need a physics engine of some sort right?) which may or may not be correct or feasible.

mark.

I would rather like an engine. Something that deliveres me
-dynamic and configurable menus that i can connect to properties,
-different “gametype-templates” with apropriate classes so that i don’t have to implement movement, scrolling etc myself but rather just “configure” certain values for it
-a good statemachine
-a pluginmechanism for custom game logic

Lets think about an example:
A normal 2D shooter.
We would initialize a list of gamestates (menu, options, game, highscore)
We would then assign the menue entries to the states in some kind of ini file.
For the game we would have a scroller template with the configuration:
top down scrolling, player control = mouse/cursor
Playerhitpoints=1
Damage=1
And then a list of levels:
-background=a
-enemylist(enemy, hitpoints, chance for occurence, custom(movement)script)….

something like that.

We would provide the resources in a standard folder /resources.
And fire it up !

Programming would be reduced to custom scripts mainly.

http://rpg-1d6.sourceforge.net/hg/1d6/file/tip/blob_battle/blob_battle.py

It should be well commented enough to be readable.

general_gaming_lib (api)
|-sidescrolling games (api)
||-a game
|-arcade games (api)
|-
|-
|-

It would then also be possible to change the general gaming api while maintaining the api for specific game types.

Would you like to work together on this (if there isn’t already a great solution out there which i simply don’t know)?

At the moment I mostly work on very basic stuff: What does (almost) every game need.

At the moment I’m working on babglet which facilitates using pyglet inside the main projects mercurial repository ( http://rpg-1d6.sf.net/hg/1d6/ ), but we could move the code for the lib into its own project.

At the moment it provides
* The Scene class - Scene(pyglet.Window) - with
- A simpler event_loop (you just need to define the action() method inside your game)
- Some generally needed events (the arrowkeys should move the self.protagonist)
- The things to show in the “actors” attribute
- And some __init__ already taken care off, for example enabling transparency.

* The Thing class - Thing(object) - with
- collision detection
- different movement styles
- fluid movement with the arowkeys already implemented.
- image, position and width and height added.

Also I have some other concepts which are in the works.
One example are Beings, which consist of many Part(Thing)s with fixed positions relative to a base Part(Thing)s.

Current source of the “module” (It’s not yet a real module, I think, but it proved quite useful): http://rpg-1d6.sourceforge.net/hg/1d6/file/8b12bc459cb8/blob_battle/babglet.py