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Introduction

Introduction to Pyved Engine

The Pyved engine, or PYV for short,

is the name of a game engine fully written in python.

PYV is more or lesse a wrapper around the popular pygame library.

If you have some prior experience developing games with pygame, transitioning to PYV should be quick and relatively easy.

Why PYV?

Confusion appears to exist within the community regarding the differentiation between a Python package, and a game engine.

It's crucial to understand that although Pygame functions as a regular Python package/library, it doesn't provide the extensive array of features present in a specialized 2D game engine!

Consequently, it might not satisfy all the prerequisites essential for the development of a fully-realized game.

With PYV we wish to create a new standard for python game development, adding new features and possibilities.

Our ultimate goals

  • The primary goal of PYV is to elevate the accessibility, learnability, and overall experience of Python game development to new heights.

  • In the long-term, with PYV we aspire to elevate Python game development by ensuring it becomes easier to use, easier to learn, reliable and a source of economic growth for many individuals.

How to accomplish this? By definiing many useful features as described in the next section.

Warning

The engine Pyv is an ambitious and still experimental project. Do not consider anything you see here as production-ready. Instead, we hope to receive some help from the community of open-source fans. If you spot bugs please go to our GitHub page and at leaste create an Issue! Explain how to reproduce the bug. If you have some spare time, you may fork the project then improve the tool. Pull requests are very welcome!

Select an architecture/a pattern for your game

Design patterns are crucial to be effective in game development.

In the context of pyv, you can select one out of three design patterns:

  • Mediator : this solution is the more flexible. It offers centralized event manager object that will simplify object communication, and you can basically work as you prefer.

  • As of today (november 2024) The Actor based pattern is the recommanded gamedev API, for newcomers and testers of the Pyv solution.

  • ECS : the Entity Component System ; if you want to directly review some code examples you can go to ECS Examples

  • MVC : the Model-View-Controller pattern is a more strict variant of the Mediator.

Please go to the dedicated page, and start learning more about the design pattern you plan to use!

Engine features

To conclude this overview, we provide you with a list of the ton of features, the game engine Pyv comes packed with.

  • Event queue (simplifies the use of patterns such as: Mediator, the MVC pattern)
  • Design patterns (Such as : Mediator, Actor-based, ECS, and MVC)
  • Gamestate stack, state management via events
  • Simple GUI creation: buttons, checkboxes, etc.
  • Tileset loading, sprite animation
  • Tilemap parser (based on .tmx or .tsj file formats)
  • Mathematical tools: matrices ; vectors ; gradient noise functions (->procedural generation)
  • Helper classes for multiple types of games : Roguelike, RPG games, Card games (Poker, Blackjack ...).
  • Helper classes for adding artificial opponents/intelligent entities (NPCs) to your game
  • Isometric 3D game engine
  • Ease of distribution (Our platform KataGames will help deploy the game and make it playable through a browser in seconds)
  • Helper classes to create stories
  • Helper classes to generate terrain randomly (level generation, etc.)

Results

All ideas presented above will allow you to create a great variety of games without too much trouble!

Below, you can see some screenshots of game created using Pyv in a very short period of time.

Game examples

Tip

There are numerous examples of games that you can see in the Showcase page ! To inspect source-code of many sample/experimental games, you may visit: https://github.com/pyved-solution/game-templates-index this is an amazing and rich source of information for any new developer to Pyv

This is only the beginning!

More features will be available before 2025, and many more games are expected to appear early in 2025. Maybe the next fantastic Pyv-based game will be created by you?!