I'm a big fan of Mousechief's games and afaik they are all made with PyGame.  There are also tons of great visual novel's made with RenPy.  Most of the big games I've seen made with Python are turn based or adventure games. I haven't seen many examples of computationally expensive games with lots of dynamic objects written in Python, but I have played a few Pygame platformers and shmups made during LD48.  My best advice would be to implement expensive stuff (rendering, collision, particles, etc.) in C or on the GPU and use Python for high level game logic.

I may add stuff that's not as essential (like animation frames)

I'm a huge fan of this style of low res, prototyping sprite sheet, but people rarely do even simple 2-4 frame basic animations for any of the characters monsters.  This is generally ok for turn based games, but it can be hard to make a decent feeling platformer without some basic animation.

TLDR, please include animation frames if you're going to make some!

It would help to know what issues you're running into.  Does it not turn, turn too fast, crash, not compile?  I feel like stylistically your C code is a little weird (passing in a float pointer and constantly dereferencing it), but nothing sticks out as being completely broken.  If it's angles vs. radians it happens outside of this function somewhere else in your code.

[ray casting]

Raycasting is a way to render essentially 2d data in pseudo-3d. Raytracing is what you're doing.

  What a noob, sorry this is only the second game I've ever attempted to make, thanks for the clarification 

Countering pedantry with more pedantry.  The first usage is actually correct.  What he's doing is ray casting not ray tracing.  Ray tracing specifically involves casting more rays at the intersection point to calculate reflection, refraction, shadows, ambient occlusion, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_casting.  Ray casting can be used to render 2D data in psuedo 3D, and this version of it has been popularized with the use 2.5D ray cast engines from the 90s, but with the power of modern GPUs it's made somewhat of a comeback for rendering 3D data like sparse voxel octrees and signed distance fields.

I mean there isn't a Spelunky, Fez, or Meat Boy level game but a lot of the games (like FTL) are deserving of an IGF.

I like FTL a lot more than Spelunky, Fez or Meat Boy.  But, of course it's not a platformer so it doesn't quite reach the "level" of those 3 on TIGSource .

It kind of is a game...

I only play games with 9000+ FPS. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiMHTK15Pik

IN.

So the language for the Vita is Java? Ugh.

Nope C#.

OH MY GOD WHY

Why is it that hard to just give us C APIs nowadays?

There are a couple of different reasons. The biggest is probably security, it's more difficult to sandbox C (ask Google). People could start going the Adobe Alchemy route and offer a version of C that compiles to to byte code and only has access to a limited API and sand boxed memory, but that is more difficult to implement than porting mono.  There are also political reasons why C# is used, obvious with Microsoft picking it for XNA, but I imagine Sony chose it for PS Suite to both poach XBLIG developers and .  Also most developers would rather code in C# than C or C++ if given the option.  The reasons for writing code in C are speed (and if you're working on a PS Vita game that needs C speed you can probably get a full devkit, otherwise you're doing it wrong), portability, and taking advantage of all the C libraries available. I think that all except the last one aren't really concerns for hobbyist indie developers targeting PS Suite. 

At this point C# is relatively portable as far as game development is concerned.  You can use it build games similar to what most indies are building for most platforms indies are making them for (PC, Mac, Linux, Native Client, Android, iOS, 360, PS3), and there are a ton of high profile indie games that have been written with C# (Fez, Atom Zombie Smashers, Dishwasher, Monaco, Terraria, Bastion, etc.)

...but also no one knows what's going on.

Heh, I wrote a how-to guide, and a lot of people are still saying they don't understand my game.

I'll check out your game when I get home from work.  From what I can see and looking at the comments it seems like your game is way more complex than mine is and the primary issue is the interface is confusing.  

In my case some of it is interface (having build and attack be the same key, broken research meters), but I think it's more that the game rules aren't clear and the goals are also unclear.  I'm pretty sure a good amount of people don't understand that's it's a 2 player local multiplayer game. People don't know that cities give them research points which allows them to level up and jump higher, so when you first get in the game you assume jumping is broken.

My game. Already getting knocked for local multiplayer (I knew that would hurt), but also no one knows what's going on.  Also getting more shit for not having a title screen or instructions than I expected.  Oh well, it is pretty half assed and I almost didn't submit .



http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-23/?action=preview&uid=194

Played through it, pretty awesome game. I'd like to see the same concept expanded, more articles, more events, less randomness in the game play and more strategy, etc.  Great for two days.

Do you guys know about Indie Fund? There's probably more opportunities for game VC like that. Kickstarter is hard because all people have to go on is a video, images, and a description and that's pretty risky given how few games make it to completion. VC firms can meet with developers one on one and guage much better what sort of people they are working with. Don't be pissy about Kickstarter not working for you. It's a miracle that it works for anyone, really. There are other avenues that are much friendlier to unknowns.

Yeah, because Indie Fund works so much better than Kickstarter .  There is no magic solution.

It's simple enough to add a lua vm to any C or C++ game that there is almost no reason not to, even if you don't end up using it that much it can be useful to hack in quick things without a rebuild and do configuration stuff.

To me, it's a pretty simple breakdown. If you are a programmer at heart, (you enjoy the process of writing code for the sake of the process itself), then C/C++ is where you will ultimately be happiest. If writing code is not your favorite part of the process of making games (you just look at it as the necessary glue that you need to write to create a game) then you should use other tools.

Actually, I think that writing interesting code and writing code for interesting things are two very different (though of course not always mutually exclusive) things. I love both C and C++ and I've written a huge engine (see my sig.) in C++ and loved every second of it, but often when I work on games, when they are not interesting programming challenges, the programming of them is a tedious part that I'd rather not do (it's almost like content creating than programming) and that part is always a strong case for high level languages.

I think of myself as a programmer at heart, but I don't really enjoy C/C++ that much. I prefer managed languages (AS3, haXe, C#) more than fighting with C/C++. Maybe it's a difference between micro and macro management. I enjoy feeling like a supreme overlord "those object are all connected and work in a spectacular manner, haha!" instead of "f*ck, I forgot to free a pointer somewhere here..."

I completely disagree that people who are "programmers at heart" should like C++ and I've written C++ everyday for a living for the last 10 years. Most professional software engineers do not work in C++, people that work in Java, PHP, C#, Python and Ruby are just as much programmers at heart as people that work in C or C++. Actually, if someone is a hardcore computer scientist or software engineer type I'd expect them to not like C++ and instead be fans of Lisp, or Haskell or ANSI C or something. There are also some people that are artists at heart that work mainly with C++ (Zach Gage and Chris Makris for example), so a lot of it comes down to use the best tool for the job.  If you are making a pixel art platformer for PC and Mac you probably don't need to write it in C++ except for portability reasons.

That's too bad, I was looking forward to Shadow Physics. Are you working on another game now?

Had to get a real job (one that actually pays well and gives me health insurance). In my case a real job is still game development though. Might do some more indie stuff though in the future.