free python3 book

Another free python3 tutorial book is online:

http://beastie.cs.ua.edu/cs150/book/index.html

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 5,400 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 9 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

installing pygame on python3.x

nice useful blogposting (using Linux): http://pythonfun.wordpress.com/2011/08/08/installing-pygame-with-python-3-2-on-ubuntu-11-04/

pycrawl on hold

The pycrawl project (part of ThePythonGameBook project) is on hold for now, as i will not find much time for it for the rest of this month. Things may hopefully change next month.

The reason i have no time is rather pleasant: i was hired to help coding a commercial game 🙂

Meanwhile, pycrawl actiondemo is playable: the player can change between dungeon levels and try to do various actions with the items in thd dungeon. Many features are however not coded, such as moving monsters, a resonable disarm mechanism for traps, some actions for items etc.

itemdemo

The pycrawl_itemdemo.py ( part of my ThePythonGameBook project ) is finally working.

I re-wrote my complete class structure and i will have to apply those changes to the previous walkdemo and monsterdemo some time in the future.

In the itemdemo, it is now possible to walk around, pick up (stacks of) items and drop single items. Monsters are present, but staying around idle.

Next step: creating an actiondemo, where you can fight monsters and interact with shops, traps, doors, ladders etc.

The pure python text-only adventure / rpg Game First Fantasy is currently developed on github by Dale Everett and friends and i must say i’m very impressed.

Dale is writing a blog about his project and i’m very happy that there are more pure python game projects out there. Sadly, i am slow enough already with my own project so i decided not to involve myself into Dale’s First Fantasy project, at least for the moment. It is nice to see how active the First Fantasy project is developed on github ( nearly daily pull requests ).

fork graph of The First Fantasy project on github.com

Flattr:

pycrawl_itemdemo not done yet

just a short update:

I work on pycrawl_itemdemo but it is not done yet. While the demo is working in parts ( you can correctly inspect stashes of many items, you can pick up items etc. ) i keep rewriting it over and over because i have not yet found a good architecture for all my classes. Partly, because i’m never sure what kind of features i actually want to have in the itemdemo. Hopefully, you will see a working itemdemo soon.

history of pycrawl_itemdemo.py on github

No separate Flattr-Button this time.

pycrawl_monsterdemo

On my work for an python rogue-like game pycrawl ( part of my ThePythonGameBook project ) i managed to create another workable demo:

see it on githup: pycrawl-monsterdemo.py

The monsterdemo, while improving the code for the level class, focus on animating Monsters (M). The monsters have a little state machine (moods) and loose energy when moving around too much. If the energy level of each individual monster is too low, it goes to sleep (Z) for a while, until it runs around again. In the animatied gif above, you can see ho the Z is changing into M and vice versa.

pycrawl-monsterdemo.py notice the changing state of the monsters ( M ) between awake and sleeping ( Z )

On my research for this project, i made a google seach for “python” and “rogue like game” and found this excellent tutorial.
The tutorial gave me already valuable insight into room and level creation ( i will have to make a new mapmakingdemo ) and i look forward to play around with the libtcod module. As far as i understand from the tutorial, libtcod does not only provide colored text output for rogue-like games but also many other important features like line-of-sight and field-of-view calculation.

I also feel that it would be a good idea to seperate stackable items ( that can be moved around, like loot, keys, gems, swords etc. ) from Monsters ( who move around self-propelled ) and walls ( non-moving). I have to make an itemdemo next and a levelgeneratordemo.

Please flattr:

pycrawl_walkdemo

progress at the pycrawl project (pycrawl is part of my ThePythonGameBook project):

the little ( ugly ) pycrawl_walkdemo.py works fine now. The player ( an @ ) can be moved around and he does not walk through walls anymore.

pycrawl_walkdemo.py

It’s also possible to see a detailed description of the tile where the player stands and a list of possible actions. ( You can only look at the list at the moment, i still have to code the actions).

Next step: to make little demos for shopping, fighting, traps and treasure boxes.

please flattr:

pycrawl

I finally found some time to code on my ThePythonGameBook project. Due to my obsession with the game Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, i decided to make my own dungeon crawler:

pycrawl (on github)

The idea is to have an well documented roguelike dungeon crawl / exploration game written in pure python. Python3, i made the jump from python 2.x to python 3.x.

Combat is not yet implemented, but at least the game can generate randomzied levels:

pycrawl – random generated levels. Some walls (#) have doors (d) or are empty space (.) to create bigger rooms.

The game should be compatible with several graphic modes. At the moment, i work only with text, but i think of a sdl-based tiles-version (pygame?) and maybe one of those color text modules like the one used in Brogue or Dwarf Fortress.

Personally, i need a minimum of eye candy and play Dungeon Crawl never in text and only in graphical tiles mode.

screenshot of the tiles-version of dungeon-crawl stone soup. image source: crawl homepage (click on the image)

As i find the whole Ren’Py project a joy to code (and to use as a programming teaching tool) i may even find a connection from my pycrawl to Ren’py .. who knows.

Flattr me :

CompoHub

CompoHub, a little site that lists all kinds of game development events that are available all around the world. 

 

It is possible to move the timeline into the future or into the past. A very nice tool. Here is the link:

http://compohub.net/

Thanks to Thomas R. Koll for sharing this information in Google+.

On the compuhub website you can enter your own game event and find are interesting links, like:

• http://www.gameconfs.com/, a worldwide list of games conferences
• http://www.pixelprospector.com/indie-resources/ (indy game resources )
• and 2 other nice links

hopefully more links will appear on the site in the future.

The CompoHub website allows to create a customizeable RSS-Feed so that warnings about upcoming game events appear in time in your RSS feed-reader (like google reader).

Yes, you can
( i wanted to add a link to flattr compohub directly, but this functionality of flattr (flattr unclaimed things ) seem to exist no longer. Sadly.