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Tuesday, 3 July 2012

2D Platform games with PyGame

I've been writing computer games for quite a long time but rarely finish anything and never publish them. Just to show that I can actually finish things, here's Object Collector 2D, a tiny game very similar to Manic Miner and a hundred other old platform games. It took one day to program and comes in at 388 lines of Python while still, hopefully, being fairly readable in case any newcomers to Python or PyGame want to use it as an example. Don't expect a competitor to Braid.

I have a tendency to spend a lot of time working on the mechanics of games, finely tuning collision resolution and other rules. There's a great talk on YouTube by Martin Jonasson & Petri Purho called "Juice it or lose it" which shows how much more you need than good mechanics to make an enjoyable game, and it's these things I need to work on.

The code is in my github repository "2dgames", under the directory "collector": https://github.com/jmacarthur/2dgames/tree/master/collector. You'll need PyGame to run it.