Temple of The Roguelike Forums
Development => Development Process & non-technical => Topic started by: Pickledtezcat on February 22, 2014, 07:41:44 AM
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Is there a way of making games for mobiles (android) with python? (for free, I don't want to pay out for any licenses, it's just my hobby, not a job).
I hear about Python + Libtcod and other things, but I'm already using a nice 3d game engine that gives pleasing results. The only thing Blender Game engine can't do is make games playable on mobile devices (there has been some work towards that, but not much progress after 2-4 years and the blender developers are talking about killing off the game engine altogether in the future).
I've had plenty of experience of making and using sprites and 2d tilesets, I first started making game content as a modder for civilization 3, and recently I made some demos to revisit the process, so it really wouldn't be a problem going to a 2d game engine.
However, I'm comfortable with the python scripting language, as it's easy to use and fast to write, so I don't want to start messing around with C++ or anything like that.
Anyone got any advice?
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I think no matter what you do you're going to have to deal with Java at some point. Even if it's just a wrapper that calls a python interpreter/JIT.
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I believe that Unity supports Boo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo_%28programming_language%29), which is heavilly python-inspired.
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I had a look at java when I was thinking about using unity. It doesn't seem that bad, though I didnt like unity.
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I had a look at java...
If you do go with Java, my library SquidLib (https://github.com/SquidPony/SquidLib) may be very useful for you. It doesn't have a display interface for mobiles (I recommend libgdx maybe), but it does have quite a bit of utility classes for roguelikes that you'd be able to use.
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I had a look at java...
If you do go with Java, my library SquidLib (https://github.com/SquidPony/SquidLib) may be very useful for you. It doesn't have a display interface for mobiles (I recommend libgdx maybe), but it does have quite a bit of utility classes for roguelikes that you'd be able to use.
thanks, I'll certainly give it a look if I go with Java.
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A quick search doesn't reveal anything very polished for mobiles using Python, though there are some things in development.
Moai (http://getmoai.com/), Corona (http://coronalabs.com/products/corona-sdk/) and Gideros (http://giderosmobile.com/) are all Lua-based game engines intended for publishing on mobile devices. I haven't used any of them yet, so I can't necessarily give advice on what's the best. They all offer free versions, with more advanced features coming in paid versions.
It's not Python, but Lua's a scripting language like Python, and it's pretty easy to learn and use.
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Gideros looks really cool. Might give this a spin myself...
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If you don't mind restricting yourself to android, Ruboto http://ruboto.org/| (http://ruboto.org/|) is really nice. It's a framework for developing android apps in ruby. If you like python then you'll probably like ruby too, and it won't take you long to get comfortable with it. My biggest issue with ruboto is the start-up time, which takes about ~15 seconds on my phone. The developers are definitely working on reducing this and there was even a google summer of code project in 2012 aimed at this issue.
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http://kivy.org/ looks really cool.
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Thanks for all the replies! I'll take a look at each and give them a go.
I'm working on a project right now for windows, but there's a lot of art stuff I'll be able to re-use later in a simpler mobile project I hope.