Cocos2d

I've been playing with cocos2d, a game framework built on top of pyglet, the pure Python OpenGL interface. The cocos2d tile map engine supports hex grids, which is the feature that interests me the most. Hex map libraries for computer games are not very common. But it is just my luck that the test/demo for that feature does not seem to work. It was quite a let down. I'm deciding whether to waste any more time on this.

cocos2d has been ported to the iPhone, and there are two Android (1, 2) versions in the works. It is a little annoying that the Python version is only 0.4, even though it was first, while the iPhone version is already at 1.0. Damn those appealing big markets. ^_^

Games In Python

I have an several ideas for games that I want to write in Python, and until recently, the pygame library seemed like it provided the best foundation to 2D games in Python. I've only played with pygame a little so I'm by no means an expert, but it seemed to work quiet well. My game ideas require a hexagonal grid engine, and today I found PGU, a pygame library which includes a hex tile engine. PGU appears to be quite old and yet I never noticed it until today. The release date's indicate it was orphaned for while, so maybe that is why I missed it before.

As I said, until recently pygame was the only game in town, if you'll pardon the pun. Another library that is becoming very popular, is pyglet, which uses OpenGL to do all the drawing. pygame depends on the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library. SDL is cross platform, but it is not commonly used on Windows and the Mac, which makes life difficult for developers who wish to target those platforms.

Right now, I'm going to play with PGU first. If the hex tile engine provides what I need, then pygame will still be first choice for me.