TIGSource Forums

I'm having a ton of fun with pygame, hacking out crappy 2D games. I'm thinking about trying out another language/framework, and have read through the stickied topics, but wondering if there was something I may have missed.

Pygame:
Pros:
it's great! Light, open source, mainly does what I need it to do.
Cons:
I really have to do absolutely everything myself.

Cocos2D (not the 'Cocos2D for iPhone'):
Pros:
Light, open source, uses pyglet so I get some OpenGL goodness in there. Does a lot of things for me! Guis! No more blitting (from what I've read)!
Cons:
Looks to be a slight bear to install. There might be something even SUPER BETTERERERER out there.

So, I ask the TIGSource community, is there? Am I missing a really great 2D games library?

PS I'm not particularly attached to python.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21471.0

Read the stickies!

Also of worthy mention:
LOVE 2D
Gamemaker
Flixel
Flashpunk
Stencyl
Construct 2
Construct Classic
Multimedia Fusion
Unity
SFML(multimedia library, not really "game" oriented)
Polycode

Also relevant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_game_engines

They're all good, try them all... Allegro, clanlib, pygame, pyglet, cocos2d, hge, love2d, corona, flixel, ...

At the moment I've using cocos2d-iphone, its like a big sack of tools, with most of what you need in there, if a little disorganised. I had a lot of fun with pyglet a few years back, but i don't think its being updated anymore. And I'm using SFML for another prom., but i think that might be too low level for what u want..

They're all good in their own way, be beware: they dont all target the same platforms...

The first and also the last time I used Cocos2D, it was soooo slow. I'm not sure if there was just some bad config or anything, but I think in the tile demo it managed to get somewhere around 30FPS whereas in Pygame I can get hundreds without any problem.

IMO if you want to make 2D games in Python, then Pygame is definitely the best choice. You can also take a look at Rabbyt (http://arcticpaint.com/projects/rabbyt/) though, which is a sprite library using Pygame (or Pyglet) and it's written in Cython which means that it is fast as hell (it can manage thousands of sprites moving, changing colors, colliding with the edges of the screen).

Gotta throw AS3 into the ring. 
Blitting Engines:
Flixel, FlashPunk

"3d" 2d Engines:
Genome2D, nd2d, Starling

But alot of those aren't really open source libraries, they are proprietary engines.

I was seriously considering Flixel, but I hear ppl complaining about Flash performance. It's also 'just kinda open', since the whole Flash thing is owned by the Adobe behemoth.

Have you hacked around with LOVE2D? How's Lua?

Polycode looks aces, thanks!

I'm looking for language+libraries that can target PCs/Macs.

I was reading up on Rabbyt, it looks pretty awesome, and fast.

Reading further, it looks like there's a cython binding for SFML, pySFML2, that would be blaaazing fast.

The closer you want to get to completing a game, the more development freedom you have to sacrifice. This is going to be true no matter what solution you reach for. Full-featured engines are almost always designed with a specific game type in mind. You'll either be building for a specific game type, bending an existing engine to work for a specific game type, or cooking the whole thing up yourself. (the most time-intensive solution)


If you really want cross-platform, your best bet would be one of the more low-level langauges. C++ is considered standard for game development. I've been brushing up on my C++ recently, and have been having much greater success than previous attempts. SFML is a great library to use for getting some visual and audio coding done quickly. Allegro is also pretty popular if you are willing to go with old-school pixel drawing. SDL is commonly used, but I suspect that adherence to it is tied up with its compatibility with iOS. I personally prefer SFML to SDL. SFML has been easier for me to work with, and has certain features that make it a better solution in my mind.

One of the biggest advantages to C++ is the sheer number of libraries available for it. A capable programmer can mix-and-match solutions.

late to the discussion but my two cents...

I used pygame to make my game: http://dinopuzzlegame.com/ (http://dinopuzzlegame.com/)
It was great to dev in as a newbie for the reasons you said, but cross platform distribution was more trouble than you would think (mainly on mac). If you're new to development like me, figuring out the poorly documented py2app and similar solutions was a pain.  The only other commercial games I know of built with pygame are the ones from Mousechief http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/mousechief/About.html (http://p4.hostingprod.com/@mousechief.com/mousechief/About.html) (Witches Yarn and Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble) and Phil Hassey's Galcon http://www.galcon.com/games/?action=game&name=igalcon (http://www.galcon.com/games/?action=game&name=igalcon) though I'm not even sure the most recent version was built in pygame.

Thought I'd revisit this thread with more of my thoughts on pygame and cocos2D (python).

They are both great. Pygame is much older, has a zillion libraries for it, but really has you do alot of things yourself.

Cocos2D has great code organization bits, like scenes and so forth, and actually sits on a few other libaries which makes things a bit... interesting. It relies on pyglet and pygame, to be specific.

I found my code was much cleaner and easier to deal with in cocos2D, but googling for answers only gets me reams of info on cocos2D for iPhone (Objective C).

The mailing list is really excellent, though, the main contributor answers nearly every question within the day. And if you're still stuck, you can look through the coco2D examples, cocos2D tests, or fuddle your way to the source, which, weirdly, has better documentation than the actual documentation.

Compiling is a bit of a hassle, I got a pretty good workflow going using py2Exe, from what I read, I need a Mac to make a Mac port, which makes sense, I suppose.

Hope this thread helps others deciding on a light, 2D framework.