BrickBats

UPDATE 22/6/04: BrickBats 0.1 Beta now out! See Downloads for details.

The old old game of using a bat and ball to demolish a wall. You know, a clone of Breakout or Arkanoid or Through The Wall or whatever you know it by. Nothing greatly imaginative, so why am I doing something that had been done - probably better - a million times before?

To learn to use pygame.

Pygame is a very nifty SDL wrapper for python, itself a rather nice interpreted language. It's easy to develop small games swiftly using these, which suits my ambitions and the time I have available.

As a framework for future games.

I read somewhere that someone had some theories about game development and code reuse. Without going into detail, it does seem that there are many things that many games have in common. Once you've made one of them, it is not so hard to use it as a framework for making other games in double-quick time.

Becuase other breakout games don't scratch my itch.

I don't approve of the use of the mouse as a game controller for these sorts of games. Not least on my little laptop where I have Linux installed, as touchpads are really bad. Horrific rains of collectable items aren't my scene, either, and I find that a lot of the others that I've played are a bit too slow.

Because I like coding.

Coding is fun. Coding is both creative and technical - it's more rewarding than a game of Unreal Tournament, and just as geek-friendly. It's nice to have something to show for yourself at the end of a session in front of the computer...

There's one problem - it occasionally gets funny around other applications that use sound. This ought to be fixed.

A gratuitous screenshot:

Oh yes, and the current todo/done list. Should be in sync with the CVS snapshot.