I really like Fred Brooks' idea of the unavoidable "pilot system," which I think is relevant here:

In most projects, the first system built is barely usable. It may be too slow, too big, awkward to use, or all three. There is no alternative but to start again, but smarter, and build a redesigned version in which these problems are solved. The discard and redesign may be done in one lump, or it may be done piece-by-piece. But all large-system experience shows that it will be done.

The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.

Engineering something new can be a process of discovery and a kind of research. Software engineering is really complicated, and it's often impossible to deeply understand a problem domain before diving in and building a first-draft solution.

Update!  The list of talks & workshops has been announced, and it features several game-related events:

- A talk by Devon Scott-Tunkin about the physics in Octodad.
- A crash course on Game Maker by Chris Senyk.
- A talk by Bill Sempf about refactoring the rules of Warhammer to make it approachable by a 6-year-old player.
- A 72-hour game jam with dedicated space in the conference lounge.

Also some friends & I are hosting an installation / art game arcade called "Dirty New Media Glitch/Artware Dungeon Party Environment."  We'll be trying to cross boundaries & bridge gaps between glitch/software art and game development.

I hope you'll come, and if you do please get in touch! Registration and other info is here: http://www.notacon.org/

It's a few months out yet, but Notacon/PixelJam is an event worth a look, especially if you're in the midwest US.  Notacon is an annual hacker conference & PixelJam is its demoparty/competition component.  This year has a strong videogame current; games will be part of the PixelJam competition for the first time, there are a few talks already scheduled more-or-less on the topic, and also they'll be hosting a 72-hour game jam.

Notacon is still accepting proposals for talks & workshops thru Feb 3rd: submit a proposal.  I'm excited to see videogames showing up in this hacker/DIY type of context & I'd love to see more talks/workshops/participation from other game developers who identify with DIY approaches & sensibilities

Last year a few friends & I hosted an "Art games LAN Party" & set up a bunch of different indie/art games on projectors in the ballroom for a few hours.

It's a very fun, welcoming, and interesting event -- this will be my 5th year participating & I'll also be helping out with PixelJam in a more formal capacity this time.  If you do plan to come, let me know; I'd love to hang out!

Oh thx allen, I'll check that out. I am doing some kinda hacky css stuff there

Hey thanks for checking it out & sharing your thoughts!

and I appreciate you releasing the code as open source. gonna poke around and see how you did the dialog system.

Yeah I hope that code is useful; it was my first Unity project so it's a bit messy & confused I'm sure.  It's definitely been a valuable process to build something complete that I can walk away from lessons learned when tackling my larger project

I just released a game about exploring a foreign culture and traveling by hot air balloon, called "Balloon Diaspora." It was built with Unity and runs on Mac & Windows:
http://cardboardcomputer.com/games/balloon-diaspora/

Music for the game was written by Oliver Blank & is also available under a Creative Commons license.

The game can be freely downloaded at the link above. The code is also open source and available on github.  I'd love to hear any feedback you feel like sharing!

You can use Unity for 2D games as well.  There are some community-contributed resources to make it easier & more efficient working with 2D sprites.

You can also use Actionscript & Flixel or Flashpunk, and then if you want to have a downloadable game just build a flash projector (or use some commercial app to build a more customized projector).  Then you can distribute your game for windows, mac & linux just by building different projectors for each platform.  The ease of working with Actionscript & Flixel was what helped me finally start making & completing games; I highly recommend it

I'll just be there for the duration of the conference, but I'd love to meet up with any of y'all!  It's my first time at GDC/IGF & I'm excited about the opportunity to meet folks in person

I made a few games in AS3 that were driven by data in XML files, and the source for them is on github if it helps: https://github.com/jakevsrobots/Hummingbird-Mind & https://github.com/jakevsrobots/A-House-in-California .

The first of those two links is the simpler example and probably closer to what you're doing.  Here you can see where I'm parsing the XML & making scene & dialog XML nodes into an object:

Code:

for each(var sceneNode:XML in gameDataXML.scenes.scene) {
                gameData['scenes'][sceneNode.@name] = {
                    'title': sceneNode.@title,
                    'name': sceneNode.@name,
                    'background': sceneNode.@background,
                    'soundscape': sceneNode.@soundscape,
                    'dialogs': []
                };
               
                for each(var dialogNode:XML in sceneNode.dialog) {
                    var dialogObject:Object = {};
                   
                    dialogObject['body'] = dialogNode.body.toString();

                    if(dialogNode.option.length()) {
                        dialogObject['options'] = [];

                        for each (var optionNode:XML in dialogNode.option) {
                            var optionObject:Object = {
                                'text': optionNode.toString()
                            };

                            if([email protected]()) {
                                optionObject['goto'] = [email protected]();
                            }

                            if([email protected]()) {
                                optionObject['conditionFlag'] = [email protected]();
                            }

                            dialogObject['options'].push(optionObject);
                        }
                    }
                   
                    gameData['scenes'][sceneNode.@name]['dialogs'].push(dialogObject);

(I trimmed that quite a bit; you can see the whole operation in context here: https://github.com/jakevsrobots/Hummingbird-Mind/blob/master/src/hummingbird/PlayState.as#L49
)

This is what the XML looks like for that game:
https://github.com/jakevsrobots/Hummingbird-Mind/blob/master/data/game.xml

The basic idea is that I have a bunch of scenes that looks like this:

Code:

<scene title="Home Office" name="office" background="office" soundscape="officeSound">
 <dialog>
        <body>My "home office." It was really just a desk in a corner of the living room, but it was enough space for my computer and drawer of important-papers-that-I-pretend-do-not-exist.</body>
      </dialog>
      <dialog>
        <body>
          That day, I couldn't manage to concentrate. My eyelids felt like lead, and I kept finding excuses to distract myself.
        </body>
        <option goto="office-asleep">I lay my head down on the desk and closed my eyes.</option>
        <option goto="kitchen">I got up and went to the kitchen to do some dishes.</option>
        <option goto="check-mail">I got up and went to check the mail.</option>
        <option conditionFlag="hatReturnedToHummingbird+dishesDone+mailCollected" goto="back-to-work">I decided to get back to work.</option>
      </dialog>
    </scene>

I use the "name" attribute of a scene node to identify it, so later the "option" nodes can have a "goto" attribute which tells the game where that option should lead.

I've also found XML parsing in AS3 to be the easiest of any language/library I've used.  Here's a pretty thorough guide to E4X ("ECMAscript for XML," ECMAscript being the specification that underlies AS3 and javascript): http://wso2.org/project/mashup/0.2/docs/e4xquickstart.html

The stack exchange site is out of private beta now & live to the public! http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/

Also, Scratch is pretty neat, but it's really a proof of concept disguised as a full program.  It shows potential, though, so hopefully Stencyl can improve upon it.

I've used Scratch for game design workshops with kids (6-14) and it blew my mind how well it works for those age groups. The kids were able to get really far & build playable games with much less guidance and time that I expected they'd need.  If they could use a similar system to build flash games (Scratch creates Java applets which can be slow & don't have access to the same install base), that would be so empowering & awesome.  I'd love to see a flash game portal with exclusively games built by 7 year olds!

I did an interview with IndieGamesChannel.com recently -

Part 1 - http://indiegameschannel.com/wp/2010/05/17/indie-developer-spotlight-jake-elliott-part-1/
Part 2 - http://indiegameschannel.com/wp/2010/05/25/indie-developer-spotlight-jake-elliott-part-2/

It was a really helpful way for me to structure & focus my thinking - fun!

Not trying to talk you out of hiring a programmer, but here are some resources I thought of while reading your post:

If what's slowing you down in pyglet is the lack of features like sprite/scene management, you may want to look at Cocos http://code.google.com/p/los-cocos/ or Rabbyt (tho the Rabbyt homepage seems to be missing in action at the moment).

You can also script Unity3d with Boo, a Python-like language.  There are a few tutorials  about 2d game development in Unity3d.

Also, python isn't the only high-level language available for game development!  You might want to check out löve if you haven't already - http://love2d.org/ .  As a python developer I think you'd be able to get a handle on Lua pretty quickly, they have some similarities

I'd be happy to test it - I have a G1 so it struggles a bit at times with games

I love the title!  The Oulipo was a really fascinating group of folks & there's for sure some common ground between them & indie game developers; for example the fondness for "constraints" (make a game about dragons in 4 hours / write a book without the letter 'e').

I saw this recently on some blogs, a game designer's re-interpretation of the Oulipo piece 'one hundred thousand billion poems' by Queneau:

http://www.ten-million-sports.com/

Subscribing now to the google-translated version of your blog

Awesome covers yall!  And yay Skab, that image makes me so happy

i find the platforms and caves in your game pretty annoying. You have to keep smashing the jump button to advance on almost every single square.

Thanks, that's a really clarifying critique -- it makes me think about an economy or balance between labor+reward for the player.  I can definitely see now that there are these long sections in the caves that require a lot of interaction from the player without rewarding them by either significant forward progress or satisfaction from overcoming some challenge.

Thanks both for playing & offering your thoughts!

http://dai5ychain.net/beulah/

I made one Assemblee game but all those beautiful graphics just kept calling to me, so I made another using some sprites & tiles by pgil and again the blue bird from rpmoura.

This is a short exploration-style game, which was also inspired by the current Experimental Gameplay Project theme, '100 things.'  I made it using Flixel & the complete source code is available here - http://bitbucket.org/jakevsrobots/beulah-and-the-hundred-birds/

The music & sound I made myself; music in Ableton Live & sound effects in sfxr (just mashing the mutate button really ).

This is just my second finished game, so I really appreciate your feedback however blunt!

Thanks for playing!

[totally]

Ha!  These are amazing   I would totally buy Backworld on DS.

And Skab, that is so lovely!

Will you be expanding this past the compo at all? It would be neat to see this as a longer game with more content.

Hey thanks   I would like to learn XNA so I've been thinking about porting it to an expanded version and putting it on the Xbox Indie channel (I'd have to work something out w/ the assets of course because Microsoft doesn't let you put free games on there).  That would also open up the possibility to make some 2-player levels, which could be fun.