The thing is, I'm not seeing a good game developement environment for this. Not anywhere. So here's what I think you'd want to do this pretty well:
- A programming environment with the basic requirements for a game like opening windows, playing sounds, and maybe some kind of 2D and/or 3D graphics. Plus, y'know, some programming language.
- The ability to package this up with a little installer, maybe even just a .zip file, to easily play on a variety of machines. At the very least Windows and MacOSX, but preferably also Linux and maybe others.
- The whole thing should be fast enough that you can get a bunch of 2D objects moving around the screen without too much hassle. This probably rules out anything pyGame-based, for instance, since you don't want 50 particles all doing their moving-around math and bitmap redraw in Python. I think this also rules out BASIC. I have faith (untested) that Perl would do this okay, but I reserve the right to be unpleasantly surprised :-) Alternately, whatever solution you use could have reasonable callout to C/C++ (Python? Yup, pretty much. Java? Nope)
You'd also like your installer solution to let you package up libraries easily so that you can just say "install this" without first figuring out whether they've already got libjpeg installed or something. This is where C/C++ falls down hard :-( And "use configure" isn't an answer. That's way nastier and more awful than writing the game in the first place, especially for such well-trodden ground.
Does anybody know a way to do this that already exists and is tested?
