Interesting idea. Much like Molt I've played with SDL but only in C/C++ (Programming Linux Games by John R. Hall is a great book IMO). I didn't even know there was a Perl SDL API until this post, otherwise I would have looked into it long before now.

I've always wanted to combine Perl into games programming because of its maintainability and flexibility and ease of coding. Plus it is a relative piece of cake to embed it into an engine. My thought was always that I'd write a C++ engine but that various subsystems could call Perl for things like player AI, networking, game logic, but C++ would do the heavy lifting for OpenGL, sound, etc. This sounds like an exciting alternative.

Sorry that I can't offer any "I've been there or done that" advice, but it sounds like a good plan and I'm sure it will be fun. And thank you so much for bringing this idea up - now I have something new to play with too. :) Definitely check out the PLG book from No Starch publishing too. It is a good overview of SDL and a good overview of game design in general.

Update: You're probably aware of this Moodster, but for learning about using an embedded Perl interpreter do a perldoc on perlembed. I haven't tried it myself, but it doesn't look too terrible to work with.

Good luck,
{NULE}
--
http://www.nule.org