Gorillas

You can read the original blogpost here:

http://agedgamer.com/2012/01/02/banana-bombs-gorillas-rereview/

The author of the blog posting writes nicely how a (even primitve) computer game can capture the imagination and curiosity of a young boy and how he started modifying the game (the gravity), a first step into learning how to program.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,500 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

I managed however to channel some energy into ThePythonGameBook project, more on that in one of the next blog postings.

On sunday, 11. December 2011 i was in Metalab again to see the final projects. There was good mood everywhere, because Vienna’s Python User group celebrated their second anniversary with a party and a tv team from Vienna’s technical university was also present.

I had the opportunity to play 2 nearly-finished games:

Occupay bull street

Jumping left/right in front of a Microsoft Kinec controller, you can move a bull left/right who is trampling protesters in a street. Each trampled protester is rewarded (by wall street?) with money. The goal is to make as much money as possible in a given time limit.

At the time of testing, the programming team could not get the kinet system to recognize me, but it worked with some other people.

I found the game very good made, especially the sound effects.

Octopi Wald Street

In this game 2 players control little cars by shaking Sony controllers (up/down to move forward, sideways to rotate) and have to drive their cars throug a simple maze while collecting symbols.

The funny thing was that during the game, the players (and the bystanders) were captured from a webcam and the webcam-pictures were played as a “film” after the game.

You can find project links (all on github), winners and more information about the SuperGameDev Weekend directly on the Metalab Wiki page:

https://metalab.at/wiki/Super_Gamedev_Weekend

Pictures / Videos

Click here to see all photos and videos i made: Picasa Webalbum about SuperGameDevWeekend2011

please flattr:

“Occupy” is the given theme for the super game dev weekend Game Jam in Vienna’s Metalab.

The task is to create a game until sunday evening. It does not have to be a computer game, but it should include somehow the word “occupy”.

There is even a symbolic prize to win, and participants can take their work to the coming “ludum dare” game programming event.

Last year, i made an somewhat boring, but working game called Schwarzweiss using python & pygame:

simultan turn based

This year, i am not sure that i will even finish a playable game, but i have a very fix idea in my head: i want to do some turn-based tactical game with simultan turn-based system: each turn has a planning phase and a execution phase. Both sides give orders in the planning phase and see the outcome of this orders in the excution phase. Some of my favorite games use this method, like the (older) Combat mission games or the newer indy game “Frozen Synapse“

card game

Yesterday, i played with some other dudes in the metalab a card (!) game with the aim to helping the creative game creating process to … flow. It somehow worked. The card game was rather complicated, 8 players were divided in 2 teams and had to draw cards. The card had little symbols on it like “Str”, “Dex”, “Wis” and pictogramms indicating gender, time (future, past, present), lifeform (robot, humanoid), and weight/height. After much discussing about what cards to draw most frequent value of all cards was taken to describe out game’s hero.

Our team ended up with a humanoid, strong and wise but incredible short female nomadic character from the past. We had to imagine some details and ended up with Steffi, the time-travelling, undead zombie dwarfen partygirl from the past. She is rather popular, chills out during daytime in a coffin filled with vodka (to conserve the body), has several lifetimes long experiences of party going (what she does each night) and therefore developed limited Fortune-telling abilities. For example, she can correctly divine when a party host will run out of drinks or that angry neighbors will call the police to end a loud party. She “dislike” police and other party-ending forces.

The other group come up with Alf from the future, an also somewhat humanoid, street fighting social engineer who loves pizza and pepper spray. He was later pictured as having the upper body of Alf and the lower torso of Jabba the Hud and use a pizza to shield his eyes from pepper spray.

The next task was for each player to draw (using real paper and real pencils) the main character and the ohter group had to choose the best drawing. Then we were dismissed to create a game concept including both main characters. To help, the cards had big pictures of game concepts like “manage”, “defense”, “duel”, “Betray” etc.

At this time i left Metalab to visit a lecture subotron lecture about game addiction from Dr. Mark Griffiths in Viennas Museumsquartier.

So i missed the final game concept presentations and have only a rather vague idea of what i will do during the game jam. However i found out that i liked the card game and the get-an-idea-and-present-it process of game jams very much.

please flattr:

Idle is really only useful to teach the first steps of python. As soon as leaving the interactive mode, i force students to use a different editor than idle, mostly geany.

Geany is not trouble-free. Here is some things that are not good with geany, but still better than using Idle:

• Starting python programs out of geany never worked out-of-the-box for me under the windows OS. While teaching, i always use Linux but some students use Windows at home so it’s not ideal.
• Geany is not written in Python.
• Geny has bad code-completion when compared with Idle.

Something like:
import random as r
r.

(waiting for a yellow drop-down list of commands of the random module)
never worked as good as it worked with idle.

• Geany force me to click on the “replace tabs with spaces” menu item or i get python indentation errors

On the other hands, Geany does most things right out of the box:
Line numbers, pretty code navigation panel, color chooser to get rgb codes, font size changing with mouse wheel, to name just a few.

Until i find a better solution i will stay with Geany. I wish it would be shipped together with python and run out-of-the box on every major OS.

Please Flattr this:

“Finding life we can’t imagine”

about signs of life forms inside artificial intelligence.

Watch it here: http://www.ted.com/talks/christophe_adami_finding_life_we_can_t_imagine.html

or here directly:

please flattr:

I was last weekend in Paris at the Sugarlab conference, organised by the nice folks of OLPC France. Sugar is a kind of linux user interface designed specifically for the XO (100$-Laptop, One-Laptop-per-Child OLPC). Sugar works also without an original XO: You can download “sugar on a stick”, basically a customized Fedora-Linux and boot your PC from this usb stick or you can install (somewhat out-dated) sugar packages for Ubuntu-Linux and other Linux distros.

sugar logo

Naturally i was interested in how my ThePythonGameBook would look and feel using sugar and using one of the XO-Laptops.

I found out that python and pygame is already pre-installed on the XO and it was possible to look at various chapters of ThePythonGameBook with Sugar’s Browser, copy the code-examples by the Clipboard (CTRL+C, CTRL+V) into an sugar activity called Pypi and run the examples using pypi’s run-button.

The good news:

• it is possible to run complicated demos with several sprites on the XO with acceptable speed
• the code is syntax-highlighted by pypi and changeable by the user
• sugar apps are written in python and PyGtk

The bad news:

• There is no reasonable easy-to-use file manager. All games that make use of other files (graphic, sound, python modules) are hard to install on the XO
• There is no pygame window decoration on sugar. a pygame window is NOT maximized, it simply has no window decoration. No minimze, maximize and close button. Pygame’s pygame.display.set_caption(“foo”) command is useless
• Sugar philosophy does not allow that one sugar activity (like code editor) starts another sugar activity (code zipper)

This means that at present state, only around half of the code examples in ThePythonGameBook are useful for an XO user. Biggest problem is downloading and unzipping files from the command line.

I also got deeper insight into sugar’s unique file-system philosophy. All files in sugar created by “activitys” (painting, writing, taking photos..) are saved automatically with the filename “data” (!) into an new created directory. The name of the new created directory (one for each file) is generated by sugar and looks like a very long serial number. Those directorys are created physicalle somewhere under ~/.sugar.
Inside each directory is also a new directory created (i forgot the name) wich is filled from sugar with little files describing the “data” file. User-made description, date, mime-typ, screenshot etc. are all stored here into little files. Basically it is a big file-based database on harddisk.

At the Sugarlab conference, i discussed this problem with some of the sugar developers. There was no instant solution but those possible pathways were discussed:

• Some sugar activitys (memory?) already have a feature to pack several files into one zip-file and this zip-file is maintained by the sugar file system. I could modify this code for ThePythonGamebook, writing an sugar activity that zips, display, run and unzips code-examples.
• I could try to modify the PiPi code editor to my needs (using PyGtk)
• I could modify most examples in ThePythonGameBook so that only one file is necessary instead of several files and a zip/unzip
• I could make use of IDLE, wich is downloadable for Sugar. That still does not solve my zip/unzip problems but at least i could use IDLE’s open/save dialoag as a crude file manager
• There is a not-maintained activity called “developer” wich used an program editor and included a little file manager. I could try to resurrect this activity.

Sadly, i made a lot of photos of the conference but my mobile phone(with the camera) got stolen near the Paris metro station Stalingrad. You can hear some recorded interviews (in English) and a podcast about the conference (in German) at my Biertaucher-Podcast site:

http://spielend-programmieren.at/de:podcast:biertaucher:2011:017

http://www.codecademy.com/

and clicked my way throug 8 small JavaScript lessons. CodeAcademy seems to be a very well made online-learning site: you can solve all programming tasks online in a webform (google app-engine?), you get constant feedback for each solved mini-task and there are awards and medals go keep you motivated.

“”"Dear Guido,

How can I make myself a better programmer, and work with you one day?

–Hoping in Brazil
“”"

Dear Hoping,

A good way to improve your programming skills is to participate in an open source project. Even if you don’t contribute patches, using some open source project (anything in Linux, for example!) and understanding how it works by reading some part of the source code will improve your skills — and there are many different way to contribute, for example, improving or translating documentation, verifying unverified bugs in the bug tracker, and so on.

Good luck!

–Guido

• http://thepythongamebook.com/en:help?&#donating_money

You can enter the desired amount and currency and click on the “donate” button. Thanks to MyBitcoin.com you will recive an automatic generated Bitcoin-Adress for the transaction.