Total Recall

Or total rewrite, I suppose. I've been gone from here awhile, huh? Chalk it up to completely rewriting my engine from scratch in a new language I didn't know.

It hurts my brain.

The longer I went on with the love engine, the more writing the code in lua was bothering me. And not just because it was killing my street cred (of which I have little). Writing the code in lua didn't afford me much in the way of flexibility when I ran into a problem the love engine wasn't able to handle. Writing my own code quickly became a mess, and as much as its been a pain in the ass to learn, OOP is definetly the way to go when writing games, from what I can tell. I also wasn't entirely sure how I was going to compile an actual executable without including the love engine framework - its probably easy, but it never sat well with me.

So, dumping several thousand lines of code in the bin, I jumped in on a language I'd never used before, but was recommended as being a good one for games: Python.

Will eat your face.

The last few month's free time has been spent relearning how OOP works - I do Drupal development for a day job, so I'm great with MVC, but objects and inheritance are still a bit of a stretch for me. That was the bad news - the good news is I'm using a great library called Pygame that's been totally great the more I learn how to properly use it.

...Which leads us to my latest update, which is actually several steps back from my previous post months ago. I've managed to load my maps into the game using a neat xml utility (that I didn't have to roll myself - joy!) and output to layers, which I can move and deform now. I've added back in my skelly sprite as of today, and as you can see, he's moving (if not animating or erasing):

He's like a blur.

This is huge for me, as I now am back on track to making a game, this time with a platform I feel confident will be able to take anything I can throw at it, and one that looks a whole lot more feasible for eventual distribution. There have been some more exciting developments in the game's progress in the last few months, but I'm gonna save those for future posts. Version 0.1 here I come.