Developing Games with Perl and SDL

segphault writes "Andy Bakun has written an excellent 20 page guide to game development with SDL_Perl for Ars Technica. The tutorial, which includes extensive code examples and plenty of screenshots, walks readers through the process of building a clone of the original Atari Kaboom! game." From the article: "One of the biggest benefits of using SDL is that it allows portable media applications to be written without having to be concerned with specific implementations of media libraries for each target platform. Bringing Perl into the picture takes the portability one step further, allowing media-rich applications to be written in a high-level language that can be targeted to a number of platforms. While programming using SDL requires knowledge of C and access to a C compiler, using SDL_perl does not. This greatly decreases the amount of time it takes to get something up on the screen and working."

Comments

Hmmmm....

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

It sounds good as a learning tool. It would be great if budding game coders, especially younger coders, could be given a simpler enviornment in which to begin toying with graphics and sound coding.

However, it's in Perl. And I really have to ask myself; Do I want to play games coded by people who started programming games in perl?

But seriously, whenever you code a game, you always end up using a scripting language of some kind. Perhaps this just cuts out that virtual middleman that is c/c++?

Re:Fine for simple games but...

[rheum101]

...it's an oversimplification to state that perl cannot achieve the same performance as C/C++ ... where 99% of the time is spent deep within optimized libraries and perl (or any scripting language) is used to initialize and facilitate interaction, then it is quite possible that no material performance hit will result ... only profiling can really reveal this ... ...and perl / PHP / whatever is a MUCH easier on ramp than getting into deep C++ OO structures...