Fun

This one is fairly self evident: Playing games is fun. Making games should be fun. And doing both with friends is better.

Delightful to Use

One of the core ideas that embedded early in the project is that if some piece of ppb wasn’t fun to use, we should redo it. Our goal with ppb is a genuinely delightful API. Much of this comes from reducing friction in use, but once in a while it’s about making a change aimed at giving more expressive constructions.

One of the changes that we did that demonstrates this is making class attributes the default way to initialize state. Combined with a powerful __init__ it has made rapid prototyping faster and more fun for end users.

Encourage Playful Experimentation

This principle draws from many places: Our student focus, our focus on a delightful interface, and the observation that people learn through play. As such we have spent a lot of focus on the first few hours of game development. From our five minute live demos and various tutorials that are ripe for experimentation we want testing ideas to be painless and recovering from a misstep to be as inexpensive as possible.

Community Focused

While ppb started as a solo project, it’s growth has been built on community. Decisions are made through discussion and offering ideas is rarely discouraged.

Beyond the development of the project, one of our long term focuses is game distribution. Part of the fun of making the small games ppb excel at is sharing them with others.