Box2D and Python!

Last month I set myself some goals (see previous blog post). I'm happy to say I fulfilled all of them!

Box2D

First I wanted to get my hands dirty with Box2D. The start was rough, it's a pretty complicated library. I persevered and after 3 days of playing around, I started a little project. The result is Chest Crusher. Heavily inspired by Angry Birds, the purpose is to shoot catapult balls at castles and open up all the chests. When a big enough force hits a chest, it opens up.Here is a video from when it was still in development:

Python

Second up was learning a new language. I chose Python because of it's beautiful syntax and because is has lots of third-party libraries . The syntax was so easy, I started a learning project on my second day. A game, ofcourse :) . I decided to use Cocos2D over the more popular PyGame alternative because it was based on pyglet and thus supported hardware acceleration. I had little to no inspiration and the best I could come up with was a vertical space shooter. On the third day I had a functional prototype, here is a video:

One particularly easy part of development was writing the menus. In C++ it is the most boring task of game development for me, yet here I had a menu up and running in under 5 minutes. I will probably release this game in the future but it needs some more tweaking right now.

Conclusion

Learning new things is always a fun process, certainly when it involves programming! I'm happy to have a physics library under the belt now as well as a dynamic language. For small games that don't require much processing power, Pyhon is almost always a better choice over C++.