Anyone remember Bombuzal? It was a clever little puzzle game where you walked around and tied to set off bombs. When a bomb exploded, it would also ignite other bombs nearby, so the trick was to find the correct order of blowing 'em up without getting hurt or cut off from the rest of the playing field. I loved it and played it for ages on my C64.

But enough nostalgia. The other day I got into my head that coding an open source clone of the original Bombuzal would be both a) a good learning experience and b) a way to give back something useful to the community. Cool! I always wanted to be a game programmer.

The game itself is relatively simple; no fancy graphics (I could probably do them myself using gimp or POV-RAY or both), and no need for top-notch performance. So I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't try to do this in perl and SDL. The problem is, I haven't really messed around with SDL or tried to use perl for game programming, so my questions are:

  1. Is perl a good choice for this type of project? Can I expect things to run smoothly? I won't do any 3D-rendering requiring 50fps, I just need to draw some tiles and let the player walk around on them.
  2. Is perl-SDL a good choice or are there other packages I should check out? I know there is a game programming framework for python called PyGame. Is there something similar for perl?
  3. Using perl and SDL, what kind of cross-platform performance can I expect? Will I be able to run on MacOS X and Win32 without problems?
PS. This would all be so much easier if it'd been possible to Super Search for 'SDL', but right now it only accepts search terms containing four letters or more, alas. DS

PPS. If you check around a bit using the link above you'll be able to download the original PC (and/or C64) version of the game. Try it! DS

Cheers,
--Moodster

In reply to Game programming using SDL and perl? by moodster

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