Humble Bundle Game development offer

[Larz60+]

Hey -

Humble Bundle has a year end game offer - $10 for the following
game development software

• SpriteIlluminator Lifetime License
  
• Spriter Pro RPG Heroes and Radius Wing SHMUP Art packs
  
• Voxatron
  
• HTML5 Exporter
  
• Marmoset Hexels 2.5
  
• Todoist Premium 1 year subscription
  
• Spriter Pro Basic platformer, Adventure Platformer, and Run N' Gun Platformer Art Packs
  
• PICO-8
  
• Clickteam Fusion 2.5 Standard
  
• Pyxel Edit (Beta)
  
• Spriter Pro
  
• Spriter Pro Game Effects Art Pack
  

The last four items yours for any contribution
I'm not a game deeloper, so need comments from one.

[j.crater]

It looks like some cool stuff there, especially for that kind of money. But it won't get you much beyond 2D games. Except maybe some voxel objcet creators.

[metulburr]

It seems these days there are just as many game dev programs as there are games. The only thing i see of interest in there (for me) is the art packs. But im too cheap to buy them still.

[nilamo]

I was unimpressed by this bundle. A couple pixel editors, some things I'd never be interested in, some things I don't see very many people ever being interested in, and also some art. meh, they can't all be winners.

[Larz60+]

As stated:

I'm not a game developer, so need comments from one.

Thanks for the input

[metulburr]

Dont get me wrong, i love humble bundles. I buy a lot of them.....but where the content are games. 

Ive always grown up with the mindset, why buy something if i can get it for free. Specifically the ones i am thinking of is the Pyxel Edit one (which is just a tile editor) and Spriter Pro. Which seems like a paid version of a mixture of (free and well known) GIMP and Tiled. If i wanted to view the animation of my spritesheet or specific columns of it, i would write code to loop them and show me. But then again, my games are usually crappy art work. 


I checked some of the other programs and some are just simplified GIMP/photo shop programs. I personally would save my money and just stick with GIMP. 

Like i said before...the art packs are probably the most interesting thing that catches my eye. But in and of themselves there are not a lot of sprites.

[Larz60+]

If I did want to write games, is PyGame sufficient? What about Unity
I embedded the Sargon chess algorithm (in forth) into a scanning monochrometer
back in the 80's. I always wonder if anyone found the backdoor and played
the game.

[Mekire]

If I did want to write games, is PyGame sufficient?

Really, really depends what you want to make.
I've honestly lost faith in pygame as a serious tool though it is fun to make simple games.

When there are literally engines with millions of dollars behind them available for free (Unity, CryEngine) using pygame is more of a fetish than anything else. It will take you an insane amount of effort to even come close to things you would get practically out of the box with other tools.

[metulburr]

I've honestly lost faith in pygame as a serious tool though it is fun to make simple games.

When there are literally engines with millions of dollars behind them available for free (Unity, CryEngine) using pygame is more of a fetish than anything else. It will take you an insane amount of effort to even come close to things you would get practically out of the box with other tools.

Im quite curious about this. Especially since ive considered pygame sufficient for what i want to program in games for the past 4+ years. With of course the best feature is that you write in python. 

Maybe i am just so use to pygame i do not even realize. The one thing that i can think of is that it is missing is UI features, such as default buttons, sliders, checkboxes, etc. That you have to create your own from scratch. Though there are some people have created a framework of this, they dont quite work well with how i have programmed structure-wise. There is also PyTMX for loading Tiled's TMX output. This seems like it should be added to the core of pygame. Dont even get me started on their website, it has become a complete joke. I think they lose more users solely on their website alone than anything else. 

Is there anything else that it is missing that i am not thinking of?

Ive always considered the art work is what makes most pygame games make it look like either junk or good. And most people seem to be like me... cob job the art work....because they are not fond of working on art, more on programming aspect.

[Mekire]

Is there anything else that it is missing that i am not thinking of?

Ive always considered the art work is what makes most pygame games make it look like either junk or good. And most people seem to be like me... cob job the art work....because they are not fond of working on art, more on programming aspect.

Well, as you know I'm extremely accustomed to the way pygame works, so it is hard to abandon, but look at things that would be easily available in other engines. Take particles for instance. Not only is there not a common particle engine in existance that we all agree on to just pop in (we all if we use them write the thing ourselves which is nuts). More than this, try to write one; it is impossible to maintain real performance with a decently complex implementation.

Shader programming and GPU access has become an absolute necessity in modern graphics programming and in pygame we can hardly access the GPU short of using pyOpenGL.

I lost faith mainly when trying to implement full screen alpha overlays in Cabbages and implementing the spotlights in PyRollers. Despite my best efforts there was no way to do this in a performant manner despite it being fairly simple in the context of modern computers and game design. You shouldn't have to fight so hard to eek out performance to achieve such a simple goal.