Creating a board game simulator (Python?) (Pygame?)

Question

I've decided to start working on programming an old favorite of mine. I've never done a game before and also never done a large project in Python.

The game is the old Avalon Hill game Russian Campaign

I've been playing with PyGame a little bit and was wondering if there were reasons not to try to do this with PyGame and go after some other engine/language.

What would be the disadvantages of using Pygame to build this?

I'm not worried about AI, primarily I'd just love to get a minimal two player version of the game up and running. Bonuses would be the ability to save the state of the game and also to play over a network.

Do's and Dont's for starting this project would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Separate the "back-end" engine (which keeps track of board state, receives move orders from front-ends, generates random numbers to resolve battles, sends updates to front-ends, deals with saving and restoring specific games, ...) from "front-end" ones, which basically supply user interfaces for all of this.

PyGame is one suitable technology for a client-side front-end, but you could implement multiple front-ends (maybe a PyGame one, a browser-based one, a text-based one for debugging, etc, etc). The back-end of course could care less about PyGame or other UI technologies. Python is fine for most front-ends (except ones that need to be in Javascript, Actionscript, etc, if you write front-ends for browsers, Flash, etc;-) and definitely fine for thre back-end.

Run back-end and front-ends as separate processes and communicate as simply as you possibly can -- for a turn-based game (as I believe this one is), XML-RPC or some even simpler variant (JSON payloads going back and forth over HTTP POST and replies to them, say) would seem best.

I'd start with the back-end (probably using JSON for payloads, as I mentioned), as a dirt-simple WSGI server (maybe with a touch of werkzeug or the like to help out with mdidleware), and a simple-as-dirt debugging command-line client. At each step I would then be enriching either the server side (back-end) or the client side (front-end) carefully avoiding doing too-big OR any simultaneous "steps". I wouldn't use "heavy" technologies nor any big frameworks doing magical things behind my back (no ORMs, Django, SOAP, ...).

Make sure you use a good source code repository (say hg, or maybe svn if you know you'll be doing it all alone, or bazaar or git if you already know them).

Answer 2

I don't think you should care about multiple-plateforms support, separation of front-ends and back-ends, multiple processes with communication using XML-RPC and JSON, server, etc.

Drop your bonuses and concentrate on your main idea : a turn-based, two players game. It's your first game so you'll have a lot to learn and taking care of all this at once can be overwhelming.