• Our entry in pyweek

    This past pyweek (#7) was the first that Matthew and I got to compete in. It was a lot of fun and it resulted in Gondola. Gondola has turned out to be a very fun game; especially if you are the type that likes laid back games such as simcity or transport tycoon.

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    Oct 02, 2008

  • SnowballZ 1.0 development opened

    I have opened up SnowballZ development! If you would like to help create the final version of this great game check out how you can help.

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    Aug 29, 2008

  • Windows installer for SnowballZ

    Well, I've finally got around to creating a windows binary for snowballz. It took quite a bit of fiddling to get to work with py2exe. The biggest problem I ran into was I had to replace all OpenGL imports with pyglet.gl (for those who haven't tried it, it's near impossible to use pyOpenGL with py2exe). A lot of other small stuff but it's done.

    Just as a note to windows players though; because OpenGL isn't supported as well on Vista it will run a lot slower on larger resolutions that on linux and likely windows XP.

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    Jul 30, 2008

  • No More SnowballZ

    A lot has been happening in the past months. I tried to avoid it as long as I could; but I am no longer the lead developer for the next version of SnowballZ. This doesn't mean that it's over - Micheal is still hoping to get in done as is continually looking for opportunities for publishing. It's just that it wasn't working out for me developing it.

    If you are interested in developing it I can hook you up - but be warned; there is a lot to do before it's completed. It's goal is to be a social 3D MMO so you can imagine the work involved. In my opinion what it needs is a strong leader to develop it and cut the scope down. Over it's life span the ideas and scope expanded from a simple RTS to what it wants to be now.

    The old SnowballZ Is still there. I recently packaged it for linux so it's easier to get running. Someday I may continue work on it but for now I have a rolling web development business that is taking my time.

    To help you avoid our mistakes here is what we did wrong:

    3D
    Sure it was fun to do and very noble intentions. After all we had Aaron who is good with blender. But making the game 3D brings in so many problems that we would have been better off without.
    Networking
    Everyone wants multiplayer, right? Did you know that the old SnowballZ is multiplayer? It so happens that it is... just I don't know of anyone who has actually played it against another human. Networking a game takes a LOT of work. We ran up against obscure bugs and much increased development time. It would have been best if we just focused on single play until it was complete. Not only would that have limited our scope but things would have moved a lot faster.
    Planning
    I'm also blaming this one on myself. The old snowballz code needed a rewrite. So we did that. BUT what we should have done is gone strait to implementing the old game play as fast as we could. That way we could have had a release and improved on what was there. Instead we planned a lot of other stuff that might have been fun but on the other hand might not of. As it so happens none of it got fully implemented.

    So that's what went wrong. I'm sorry I didn't see this coming before but I was naive. I know a lot of people were looking forward to a next release but I don't know if the next version of snowballz will ever happen - I hope it does but IMO it looks doubtful.

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    Jul 17, 2008

  • cx_Freeze

    cx_Freeze is a nice cross-platform tool to "freeze" your python program into an executable. Similar to py2exe which is windows only.

    I've only tried it on Linux but it has been by far the easiest to use that I've found. After installing it all it takes to freeze a program is a command. No configuration files, setup tools extentions or anything. I tested it out on 99sheep and this was the command I used:

    FreezePython -OO -c --include-modules=rabbyt,encodings.ascii,encodings.utf_8,iniparse --install-dir dist 99sheep.py

    And that does it. To explain a bit:

    The option -O will run it optimized (same as python -O script.py), -OO additionally removes doc strings from the resulting pyc files. The -c option simply compresses the byte code in zip files; makes things a bit smaller.

    I had to manually include rabbyt and iniparse (two modules I use) and put them directly into my source tree. I couldn't find iniparse because it was zipped up as an egg (I'm guessing here btw) and I'm not sure why it didn't pick up rabbyt.

    I manually compiled rabbyt in-line using the command: python setup.py build_ext -i (after building) then just copied the built rabbyt directory over. cx_Freeze automatically picked up on the .so files.

    As I am using pyglet I also had to manually include encodings.ascii and encodings.utf_8,iniparse. Google works wonders to find solutions to weird problems :)

    And lastly --install-dir dist just told it to put the result in the folder dist. Pretty simple.

    It was very fast and easy from installation to finish. If anyone tries it out on windows I'm curious to how easy it is to use there. It can't be any worse than using py2exe though I would imagine!

    Another freezer that looks interesting is PyInstaller. It appears to be more complicated to use but it does have one feature that allows you to package everything into one file. I thought that looked interesting. It claims to be cross-platform as well.

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    Jul 05, 2008

  • 99sheep

    This is a small project I've been working on a little bit here and there. It has mainly been to practice my art skills, the code and game and stuff like that has just been a side effect (although making the tile engine/editor has been quite fun too). I've been having a lot of fun with it and decided to post what's there now. It's built off of concept1 if you think some of the art looks familiar. :)

    /static/blog/99sheep_screenshot1.png

    I'm not very good at this whole art thing but I feel like I'm making progress.

    BTW, if the wolf in the last screen shot looks more like a terrier that's because both the shepherd, sheep and wolf were all done in like 4 minuets... slightly embarrassing considering how many hours I've put into the rest of the art. But it is a lot better than having a bunch of white squares hoping around.

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    Jul 03, 2008

  • Colored Terminal Output

    Being able to easily change the coloring of the terminal output has been something I've often wanted to have. Thanks to termcolor I now can.

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    Jun 14, 2008

  • First Post

    My first post on a new blog! Well, sorta new. This blog is really a continuation of my game-dev blog on joey101.net. I have a few reasons for all of this - mainly that I want a whole site dedicated to my game development. I now have my tutorials and demos better organized and will serve as a place to put future projects and such.

    I'm also planning on having this blog be a bit more casual than my last. Before I tried to only post stuff that would be relevant for more than a few weeks; but that resulted in very little posting. I will keep that blog up as there are links around the Internet to it.

    Also as a quick note I updated the first tutorial on making games with python to use pyglet 1.1 text labels instead of the font.Text class. You can find it on the tutorials page.

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    Jun 13, 2008