GameDev News for 5 November 2020

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Hello, everyone! I spent the last week of October working on a new roguelike prototype in Python and Pygame, spurred by my previous research. On Friday, it was looking like this:

Early game screenshot showing a colorful roguelike display (with ASCII characters) in a graphical window.

It was coming along quite well, too, but in the mean time I burnt out, and it's hard to code these days anyway, for domestic reasons. Might as well set it aside until conditions improve.

In the way of news, as covered by HackADay and GameDev.net, last week marked a big anniversary: version 2.0 of the Pygame library was released, right on the project's 20th birthday. Too bad this milestone was marred by the official community on Discord closing down less than a week later. Long story. Suffice to say, Pygame is everywhere... but apart from a few games published by contributors to the library, there's hardly anything made with it out there, not even included in Linux distributions where it would be easy to do so. High school students who find it on their curriculum in France or the UK might rightfully ask why they have to learn how to use it instead of, you know, Processing. And that's too bad.

No, that's not why we closed down. But now I have to reconsider some things.

To end on a happier note, we have a very good write-up titled Game Engines: A False Dichotomy, which is just what it sounds like, and very interesting. But that's pretty much it this time again. Guess people were busy with politics recently instead. Oh well. Until mid-month then, and have fun!


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Tags: meta, roguelike, programming, community, education, critique