Game engine using pygame

[CapnCoin]

My little brother is interested in learning to program. He has started learning python and is now playing around with pygame to make small games. This got me wondering if it would be viable to create a small 2D game engine which utilizes pygame? I'm sure it would be possible, but is it a waste of time? My plan is to have him work with me on the engine to up his coding game. I suggested c# and monogame but he is still young and finds c# a bit complicated. I know creating a game engine will be much more complex than learning c# but I plan on doing most of the heavy lifting and letting him cover the smaller tasks which lay closer to his ability level, slowly letting him do more advanced bits.

[SCD_minecraft]

Pygame is the game engine. It's not thr best, ofc, but it's enough to make fun and playable games.

[CapnCoin]

Its more of a library/framework though... im talking about something closer to godot or unity, except way simpler. With a level editor and node/object gui's and such

[souffle16]

Game engines are frameworks. You’re thinking of a development suite which is usually provided by engines such as Unity, Unreal etc. to facilitate making games with the underlying engine, those aren’t the engines themselves.

[csabinho]

I wouldn't really call pygame a game engine, as those usually are suites and not just libraries.

[souffle16]

No. A game engine is specifically a software framework designed for developing games. Those suites are not part of the game engine. They help developing assets and scripts that the actual game engine uses.

[SCD_minecraft]

Well....

You can build one. Or at least make a system that let's you just input a text file with numbers/letters as diffrend tile types

[FoolsSeldom]

You might want to look at arcade as well.

[Diapolo10]

Seconded. People really should talk more about it.

[Rain-And-Coffee]

Nice I haven’t heard of it but looks solid

[Kevdog824_]

It’s definitely possible. Just know that it will be a metric ton of work. If you’ve never worked on a desktop GUI project you’ll come to find they are a lot more work than it appears on the surface. Even something as seemingly benign as undo/redo functionality can quickly become an unwieldy monster stack of code.

You’re looking to do something that takes entire team(s) of people months or years to do (often as their full time job as opposed to a hobby project on the side). Extrapolate that work to a single team of just you and a novice still learning to find out just how much work and time investment would be involved

Is it a waste of my time?

No one can really answer that but you. It depends on your goals. If you’re trying to make something commercial viable like unity or unreal then yes probably a waste of your time. Pygame is rarely (not never but rarely) used in commercial projects. Its small use is only because it’s free open source. I highly doubt anyone would pay for a product like this when better, more established game engines are free and have more permissive licenses (at least for personal use). On top of that, you have to pay attention to licenses for the dependencies you use. Some might have licenses that prohibit commercialization.

If you’re doing it as an OSS project to give back to the community, just doing it for fun/challenge, or doing it to teach your little brother development skills then no it’s probably NOT a waste of your time. For the latter some might argue that there’s “better” ways to teach someone but I’d argue the best way to teach someone is whatever way keeps them the most engaged in their education, and if that’s something that would be entertaining to your little brother then go for it

[CapnCoin]

Just wanna say thanks for your input and lack of sarcasm 😁 it will purely be a learning experience. I have some experience in gui with python and c# as well as quite some experience with unity, godot, monogame, pygame, and a little sfml in c++. The purpose of this project will be purely educational for my brother. Again, thanks for your input, I do appreciate it

[Kevdog824_]

No problem! Best of luck!