Pyweek4 is over, and I’m easing my way back into normal life (if you can call it “normal”). Normal is hectic and stressful, but that’s the way I’ve lived for the past 5 years so I don’t care any more.

In hindsight we shouldn’t have dropped PGU and opted to write our own rendering, blitting, and collision detection engine in with only 60 hours left till the end of the competition. But, we made a kick butt RPG engine that we released under the LGPL 2.1. We got the blitting, the collision detection, a basic HUD, a level editor, and a map loading/saving feature. It doesn’t have and battle systems or “Fog of War”, but what the heck? We were either new to Python, or the RPG genre, but for a team of 3 coders 1 graphics/music guy and 1 sound effects guy and a project leader/graphics guy, 60 hours is pretty amazing. There are over 1950 lines of code and probably some brains chunks left in it by their sleep deprived owners.

What went wrong:
I didn’t understand how RPGs worked, and I had no understanding of 3d or 2d arrays. Because of our lack of sleep and the impending deadline (which was 2 hours at the time) we had no time to create a battle system.

What went right:
IrishCream/Brenton kept us on track and had a genius engine design. He also helped me with some of the coding thought process.

What I learned or what got strengthened:
Pyweek4 taught me a lot. Keep your goals low, excerise your body frequently. Brenton helped train me better in staying focused, this can be applied to almost anything in life. I learned so much about coding and working on a team. Version control helps a ton. Frequent communication and a site that hold static content are very helpful. I discovered that I might not want to make games for a living, so it has prompted me to begin to take a deeper look at operating systems and web applications to see if I’d enjoy that more. Games are still a great thing to do, and I don’t think I will ever tire of making them, especially with a good team.

When Pyweek5 comes around, I’ll be better prepared. The team I worked with was terrific, and I’d like to thank each and every one of them for all their incredible work.

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All Your Base Are Belong To Us!!! chown -r us ./base
"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless.'' -- Tao of Programming Book 2

"Oh, bother," said the Borg. "We've assimilated Pooh."

"Socialism works great... if there are no people involved." -- Pastor David Ginter, Union Church of Guatemala.

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[This message has been edited by CPUFreak91 (edited April 11, 2007).]