A little python, a lot of angst… for just 3 hours of work this was definitely worth it 
Click the image to view it in wordle where you can mess with it.
I love the way that Im is the biggest word, you can really see how egotistical they are on grouphug.
(Cheers to Andy for turning me onto wordle and helping with ideas).
I’ve recently been learning python and decided to note down the *very basics* that took longer to find out than I would’ve liked.
Without furtherado, heres my 5-minute-python.
It can be useful to test sounds in your current engine (esp for testing MOD support), so I’ve made a tiny sound player for pygame. The code is just this:
import sys, pygame
from pygame.locals import *
import pygame.mixer
if __name__=="__main__":
pygame.display.set_mode((120, 120), DOUBLEBUF | HWSURFACE)
pygame.init()
try:
filename = sys.argv[1]
pygame.mixer.init()
sound = pygame.mixer.Sound(filename)
print 'Press ESC to quit, any other key retriggers sound'
sound.play()
running = True
while running:
for event in pygame.event.get():
if event.type == KEYDOWN:
if event.key == K_ESCAPE:
running = False
else:
sound.play()
except IndexError:
print 'Usage tplay.py filename'
The file is attached here: Tiny pygame audio player.
Reached a small milestone in my bat and ball game (BallBreaker), the fonts are implemented as bitmap fonts, meaning that everything on the rendered on the game screen is original material.
The current font system is based on tiles, so it should be easy to implement animation and cool stuff next, it definately feels like the project is about 1/2 way to releasable.
Switching to Cairo is starting to seem attractive, especially when making bitmapped versions of the fonts.
For the moment I won’t switch to Cairo as I’m very curious to see what happens to performance when pygame 1.8 comes out.
Another reason I haven’t switched yet is a bit of lazyness - the pycairo msi doesn’t install the cairo dll… and of course the learning that goes with the new API
I’ve just finished the initial version of the font that’ll go into my game ball breaker (”Ball Breaker Caps”)… Some of the characters need more work, but it has the retro-future look I’m going for.
This means that I can feel happy about putting in the high score table and scrolling messages and they’ll have the look I’m going for.
I’ve recently started learning python in earnest, to this end I’ve been writing a bat and ball game. I’m quite suprised at how much you get for your LOC in python… so far it’s about 1,000 LOC and has multiple powerups and bats, plus sound fx by ne7.
Graphics are made in inkscape and the GIMP - ingame screenshot after the cut. (more…)
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