I did RoboCode for the end of the Intro to CS class here. It's fun to mess around with to figure out some basic robotics and AI concepts, but it's limited to the robot arena game, so it's not really the best for "making games". Would be an excellent thing for Aaron to look at for SEV scripting though. *hint* Kind of ambitious for one person to do something like that, but I think he's going for an extremely simplified Version of something like it for SEV. At least that's what I've gotten from the chat sessions.
I've heard some good things about Python for several areas of development, especially with the very fast production cycle. But then again, it's not for resource-intensive stuff, which games tend to be. Would be good to prototype in, then transfer to your compiled language of choice.
I have a chess game I made in Java a while back, I come back to it for a few days every once in a while and polish it up. What used to be extremely ugly kludge code (formatted nicely, but the logic was insane) is now only partially extremely ugly kludge code
I'm probably going back to it over winter break and finishing off the nasty parts, then either start dusting off the rudimentary AI module, or convert it to a C++/GLUT or C++/DirectX program. I absolutely abhor the Java Look&Feel, so I'm leaning that way and waiting for my AI course so I can do that part the right way
The game looks cool narf. Amazing sometimes how things can be abstracted so much that a (I think?) relative novice can code the basic framework of a FPS in a week... Keep it up, should be interesting!