PyWeek #9 has finished; we had a lot of fun, we gave our development skills a proper workout this time and we finished our game with a whole minute to spare. I'll put up an entry for it on the "games" page when we've sorted out a couple of teething problems, but if you're super-keen you can get it from our entry's page on the PyWeek website. Check out some of the other games while you're there!
Friday, July 17 2009
Vector & Porygon Updated
By chard on Friday, July 17 2009, 21:45 - Projects
As is customary leading up to a new PyWeek I have released new versions of Vector and Porygon. Vector has a couple of new little features and a fix for the horrendously innacurate 'angle_to' functions. Porygon has a minor fix to the packaging of AVBin on OS X. Latest version are recommended as always.
PyWeek 9 Announced
By chard on Friday, July 17 2009, 21:42 - Challenges
PyWeek 9 is officially announced. It starts on the 30th of August and runs 'til the 5th of September. Anyone with a vague interest in developing games should check it out, even if you don't know how yet (there's time to learn). If you do want to learn Python and take part, I recommend the following websites: www.python.org where you can get the language implementation itself and www.pyglet.org where you can get Pyglet, a library for Python that does stuff like drawing graphics, handling mouse movements and whatnot (it also has an excellent set of tutorials).
Happy Insect Garden
By chard on Friday, July 17 2009, 21:37 - Projects
I finally added our PyWeek 8 entry to the games page! Happy Insect Garden is an exciting defender type game with a jaunty traditional theme. It was well received by the challenge, ranking highest amongst the team entries and overall. So, if that's anything to go by, you should give it a go.
Its development was marred by the sudden vanishing of our SVN repository. We had to go through quite a lot to get around that situation. :-)
Sunday, May 17 2009
PyWeek #8 results are out
By adam on Sunday, May 17 2009, 11:44 - Challenges
If you're reading this website at all, it seems quite likely that you already knew about this, but the results for the eighth incarnation of the PyWeek game programming challenge were announced last night. Our entry, a pseudo-tower-defence game entitled Happy Insect Garden, took first place in the team category and overall, with a mean score of 3.98, narrowly beating our previous winning scores of 3.94 for Robot Underground and 3.96 for Wound Up! (bizarrely, The Space Adventures of Digby Marshmallow, our only non-winning PyWeek entry, scored a 4.14).
Anyway, you should head on over to the challenge page and check out the results—there are a couple of neat little games in there.
Sunday, April 19 2009
Updated Porygon -- Again!
By chard on Sunday, April 19 2009, 03:27 - Projects
I've updated porygon once more before PyWeek. Not a tremendous change but some neat things. Firstly I massively improved the documentation of the distribution mechanisms with some comments (they no longer seem like largely incongruous instructions). Secondly (and this is cool), py2app now automatically builds a compressed DMG, to paralell py2exe which zips up the exe and other data.
Thursday, March 19 2009
New Logo Designs
By chard on Thursday, March 19 2009, 22:53 - Administration
I've been trying to design a new logo following the realisation that our current one is a little boring. After doodling in Inkscape for a while here's what I came up with (although I'm not brilliantly set on any of them):
Sunday, March 15 2009
Updated Vector
By chard on Sunday, March 15 2009, 17:14 - Projects
I've just uploaded a new version of our vector library. This version includes some useful additional methods for lines, a special vector constructor function to tidy up the syntax and Rectangle class. This is all the work I'm doing on Vector before PyWeek, but I'm sure the challenge will produce lots more stuff improve on.
Updated Porygon
By chard on Sunday, March 15 2009, 16:58 - Projects
I've just uploaded an updated version of the framework we base all our games on. It's a basic skeleton project for the boilerplate code that any large game project might need, including a very stable set of distribution mechanisms.
In this update I have included support for packaging AVBin along with Pyglet and the rest of your code, a very awkward operation but useful to provide truly standalone packages. Naturally the source distribution doesn't package AVBin as the source distribution wants to be system agnostic. As usual, everything is in the documentation.
KGB Training Simulator: Detection Avoid
By martin on Sunday, March 15 2009, 12:27 - Challenges
After Adam's victory in the last PyDay, I couldn't let him hog all the limelight, so I threw something together yesterday for PyDay #6. A theme of "Surveillance" led me down a Cold War-inspired path of Soviet kitsch. Adam and Chard both egged me on considerably, and the result is a fun little thing called KGB Training Simulator: Detection Avoid. If you like mock-Cyrillic lettering and pixel-perfect runs through corridors full of lasers, then it's the game for you.
Friday, March 6 2009
And There's More...
By chard on Friday, March 6 2009, 18:04 - Challenges
The competitions are coming thick and fast. Pymike, the PyDay organiser, has seized the opportunity for another PyDay in no less than 8 days time! That is, of course, March 14th so PyDay will be on Pi Day.
Sunday, March 1 2009
CATERPILLAR FEVER DREAM!!
By adam on Sunday, March 1 2009, 00:39 - Challenges
Well, without really having planned to, I spent today writing a game for PyDay #5. Having checked out the themes just before going to bed last night, it looked unlikely that there would be any big surprises come the announcement ... until I discovered that, some time between my going to sleep and the official selection being made, someone managed to sneak "lettuce" onto the list of theme candidates.
Tuesday, February 10 2009
Upcoming: PyWeek 8
By chard on Tuesday, February 10 2009, 14:52 - Challenges
PyWeek 8 has been announced for the week from April 26 to May 3, much later that usual. For the unfamiliar, PyWeek is a biannual game programming challenge where entrants must write a game in one week, using Python and based around theme released at the start of that week. Its often a lot of fun and provides significantly more scope for producing very complete games with very thorough feature sets that shorter game sprints.
We shall be entering as usual and hope to cause less motion sickness this time around. In other news, there're rumours of another PyDay in a weekend not too far from now; the scheduling of such things is ad hoc as far as I can gather. Anyway, look out for the results from that.
Friday, January 23 2009
Announcing Vector
By chard on Friday, January 23 2009, 11:40 - Projects
We've just released one of our very useful tool libraries from last PyWeek, its a simple two dimensional vector geometry library. Head over to the project page and check it out. It sports straightforward concepts such as adding vectors together and rotating them as well as more complex ones such as cross products and projections.
Tuesday, December 30 2008
A Super Effective Website
By chard on Tuesday, December 30 2008, 19:29 - Administration
Welcome to our brand new website. I've spent a good while going through different publishing engines in great detail looking for something clean and customisable to replace WordPress, this is the result. This website is being run by Dotclear, which (except for some bizarreness with the themes/templating) presented itself well and seems to do everything I want without complaining.