Pac-Man Game: Processing Programming Language & ActionScript

Question

I'll simply title this in concordance with my Pac-Man game that I want to make.

I was suggested to perhaps start with a programming language or platform that uses less overhead than, say, DirectX. I can agree to that, especially because then I can focus on the design of the game rather than the implementation- something I think is more important at this stage.

I was wondering what merits Processing has as a language capable of creating simple games. The creation of images seems almost trivially easy, which allows me a lot of play-room to mess with the algorithms. However, I wanted to know if the language is suited for a game and possibly resource-intensive code?

At first glance, this looks almost like a simplified version of Actionscript, a language that tries to easily produce images. ActionScript is something I have already programmed in, but do not like. The language, for some reason, isn't that appealing to me. Processing isn't so much either but I feel the image processing capabilities of this make it outweigh my negative view of the syntax.

So my question is, what are the people's experience with Processing, and am I really justified in comparing it to ActionScript? Is it suitable for creating games at all? I figure with all the comfort and ease I have creating images, I feel the speed of the program as a whole would be decreased, especially when I introduce algorithms.

Furthermore, if it is suitable for creating a simple pac-man game, should I try ActionScript instead anyway?

Answer 1

Well, you're not only choosing languages, but also choosing platforms here. AS3 means FlashPlayer, Processing means JVM. I don't think processing has to necessarily needs to turn out slower, or faster. In the case of pacman, this is all a matter of rendering speed. I don't know what Processing uses for rendering, but if it is jOGL, it is possible to outperform FlashPlayer (depending on the kind of graphics).

I think, the core question is, where you want to be going with the game. If it is just a prototype, both flash and processing are good tools, each having its own strengths and weaknesses. If you really want this to be a long shot, then you also should consider several factors:

• Due to Flash's market penetration and a big gaming (and game developement) community:
  • Flash probably is a better platform for both distribution.
  • There's a number of flash game engines (also dealing with multiplayer etc.) out there, whereas I found similar engines to build on in Processing impossible to find.
• From what I can tell, AS3 is a more "serious" language, aiming for developement of applications, whereas Processing focuses on fast prototyping and image processing.

Now another question is, what you don't like in both AS3 and Processing. Personally, I switched to haXe, which proved to leverage the FlashPlayer better than AS3 does, and is a far more expressive and elegant language. However, since I don't know what your exact problem is, I cannot really give you advice.

Good luck then ;)
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