Posts tagged: gamedev

💭 Home

2025-09-04T01:36:40Z

Free online tools for people creating pixel art and other low-spec art.

My son introduced me to lospec.com, It has a great set of color palettes and amazing pixel art inspiration. I particularly liked royal armoury and of course I’m a bit partial to hollow.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Billy Basso on code architecture of Animal Well! - YouTube

2025-05-24T19:38:21Z

Great conversation with Billy Basso the creator of Animal Well on the code architecture of Animal well. It’s all hand crafted C++. He talks about early games he tried to build being heavy in oop, and really got lost in oop. Animal well is very flat, there is no inheritance, just lists of entities that all implement similar methods in their own way. Layering and order of entities becomes very important. Its crazy how much he had to think about hardware and MS build being very helpful with this, but needing to know all of the console apis.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 The Subtle Details That Make Hollow Knight Great - YouTube

2025-05-22T19:00:50Z

So many small details go into making hollow knight such a great game, but it starts with such good controls, every thing is so fluid and predictable. I knew about coyote time, but not some of the other details that Juniper covers, such as hang time, and faster decent than jump.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

💭 Dawn Gate - The Game that Solved Toxicity - 2 - YouTube

2024-01-30T23:10:12Z

Thor is just straight up a great Human being! Getting a gaming company to tie power and progression with being nice is an incredible feat.

Note

This post is a thought. It’s a short note that I make about someone else’s content online #thoughts

Pygame Boilerplate Apr 2022

2022-04-03T16:32:40Z

I’m poking a bit into gamedev. Partly to better understand, partly because it’s stretching different parts of my brain/skillset than writing data pipelines does, but mostly for the experience of designing them with my 9yo Wyatt.

pygame boilerplates #

I’ve seen several pygame boilerplate templates, but they all seem to rely heavily on globl variables. That’s just not how I generally develop anything. I want a package that I can pip install, run, import, test, all the good stuff.

My current starter #

What currently have is a single module starter package that is on github so that I can install it and start building games with very little code.

Installation #

Since it’s a package on GitHub you can install it with the git+ prefix.

pip install git+https://github.com/WaylonWalker/pygame-starter

Example Game #

You can make a quick game by inheriting from Game, and calling .run(). This example just fills the screen with an aqua color, but you can put all of your game logic in the game method.

from pygame_starer import Game

class MyGame(Game):
    def game(self):
        self.screen.fill((128, 255, 255))

if __name__ == "__main__":
    game = MyGame()
    game.run()

The starter #

Here is what the current game.py looks like. I will probably update it as time goes on and I learn more about the things I want to do with it.

from typing import Tuple

import pygame


class Game:
    def __init__(
        self,
        screen_size: Tuple[int, int] = (854, 480),
        caption: str = "pygame-starter",
        tick_speed: int = 60,
    ):
        """

        screen_size (Tuple[int, int]): The size of the screen you want to use, defaults to 480p.
        caption (str): the name of the game that will appear in the title of the window, defaults to `pygame-starter`.
        tick_speed (int): the ideal clock speed of the game, defaults to 60

        ## Example Game

        You can make a quick game by inheriting from Game, and calling
        `.run()`.  This example just fills the screen with an aqua color, but
        you can put all of your game logic in the `game` method.

        ``` python
        from pygame_starer import Game

        class MyGame(Game):
            def game(self):
                self.screen.fill((128, 255, 255))

        if __name__ == "__main__":
            game = MyGame()
            game.run()

        ```
        """
        pygame.init()
        pygame.display.set_caption(caption)

        self.screen_size = screen_size
        self.screen = pygame.display.set_mode(self.screen_size)
        self.clock = pygame.time.Clock()
        self.tick_speed = tick_speed

        self.running = True
        self.surfs = []

    def should_quit(self):
        """check for pygame.QUIT event and exit"""
        for event in pygame.event.get():
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
                self.running = False

    def game(self):
        """
        This is where you put your game logic.

        """
        ...

    def reset_screen(self):
        """
        fill the screen with black
        """
        self.screen.fill((0, 0, 0))

    def update(self):
        """
        run one update cycle
        """
        self.should_quit()
        self.reset_screen()
        self.game()
        for surf in self.surfs:
            self.screen.blit(surf, (0, 0))
        pygame.display.update()
        self.clock.tick(self.tick_speed)

    def run(self):
        """
        run update at the specified tick_speed, until exit.
        """
        while self.running:
            self.update()
        pygame.quit()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    game = Game()
    game.run()