It's nice, it's simple, it actually has a proper programming language as well as the drag and drop stuff - and it encourages you to separate resources and objects properly.
The object orientation is flaky (You are encouraged to refer to member variables of single instance objects by using the class name - and it's all a bit undefined what happens if you use a class name of an object with multiple instances, but it usually does what you want)
Basically though, it's a simple 'display this sprite' library.
It's nice and easy, and I'm thinking of building some simple stuff with it for practice.
As an example of ease - taking the sample ShootEmUp and adding multiple levels of power to the shots and a second shot type took about two hours, graphics and testing included.
Games created with it don't work under WINE?, it seems.
It's actually quite good. Though in some places almost accidentally. It supports stored procedures, for example - and assigning them to arbitary instances.
It also has a few nice (though dangerous) shortcuts. If there is only one instance of a class present on the screen then you can address it directly via its class name - rather than having to search for its identifier.
The inheritance doesn't work quite right - the useful 'find instance of (class) at (location)' function (mainly used for detecting whether you've bumped into a wall or something that can kill you) actually triggers based upon the image at that location. So if you inherited from something but changed image, then you have to use a different detection method.
Still - it does a LOT of the grunt-work for you. And helps organise image libraries. (Useful feature - if you rename a sprite then everything that was pointing to that sprite automagically gets the new name. Not so useful feature - this doesn't apply to hand-written code.) This makes it very easy to create something that talking about spr_Wall spr_Path and then go in and replace them later. Which is, pretty much, what you want in a sprite api. --Vitenka (It's slow, though - and its event-tick model is quirky at times)
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