Years ago, a non-programmer friend and I decided to write a game. And, as one would expect, it was a disaster. Now we're concidering trying again, this time with a simpler game and a far more obtainable goal. The general idea of the game is that you solve puzzles, find information, and interact with characters in the game story through a ficticious web browser, email client, and chat program. My inital idea was to build this game using DHTML, PHP, MySQL, and &#106avascript. The reasons are somewhat obvious. If it's a web browsing game, what better place to develop it than using the same technology I've been building sites in for the last three years. However, I've been wondering if I should instead develop it in some combination of C++, SDL, OpenGL, and a handful of other libraries. It sounds nice, but I have some concerns: Wouldn't the development time be greater? Which libraries and technology should I use to speed up that process? How to I prevent my friend from growing bored with the project while I'm off writing the software? It's also been quite a while since I touched C++... Does anyone have any suggestions? -Tess

Python + PyGame. Python comes with IDLE, a great simple IDE to program with. PyGame is SDL for Python. I think that would be your best bet! [smile]

Agreed - if you're going down the 'proper programming' route but are worried about development time and complexity, PyGame and Python are a good bet. (Note that you may have to trawl the PyGame mailing list to find a version of PyGame that runs with the latest version of Python.)

Having said that I'd point out that any multi-player game is a significant undertaking compared to a simple single-player one running locally. Different libraries and technologies can take much of the strain for you but it would be hard to recommend anything without knowing in more detail what you want to achieve.

I admit there's a fair bit of nostalgia involved with my inital choice of C++ and OpenGL -- it was what our former failed attempt was *supposed* to be written in.

And now having done enough research not to outright reject your suggestions, why else should I use Python and PyGame?

Without going into a long advocacy exposition, Python is a higher-level language than C++, and therefore 'does more for you'. It contains many standard libraries to make life easier and provides powerful string, list, and set handling for you. PyGame is essentially the SDL library for Python, and gives you some decent cross-platform multimedia tools to use. You can still use OpenGL on top of that if you want.