Miloping

Python has become somewhat of a hobby of mine during the weekends. So I was very excited to hear about pyday. I took this opportunity to participate and eventually submitted “G Underground”. “G” is a character I made up in university when I was playing around with c and the curses library. Since I only had ascii to work with, I chose a letter to represent the hero of the quest, the letter “G”, battling it out against letter “T”s (Trolls) in a alphanumeric landscape.

Fast forward a few years and I have not done that much game programming, except the occasional pyweek . I have been working as a professional programmer and these challenges always provide me with many opportunities to learn new things.

Since it was an individual competition I got to choose an different aspect of game programming. So, I thought I would give a top down game a go, This presented an opportunity to work with some path finding algorithms, something I have been wanting to play with for a long time. However, in a 24 hour competition it is hard to work with a feature I have not worked with before, and it almost nearly didn't work. even with that, problem with the collision detection meant that monsters sometimes walked into walls and got stuck.

Now it took about an hour and I still was not going anywhere. I had chosen to use the A* algorithm using the euclidean distance as a heuristic, pretty standard stuff for this kind of thing. However it was not working, I took a deep breath, got a beer, then started prototyping the solution by itself. This meant that I was able to step back from the game and focus on this very specific problem This worked tremendously, I could prove that the algorithm worked and find the bug in a different part of the code..... event though I used Dijkstra's algorithm to do path finding in the end. Even with the extra overhead the game didn't suffer any noticeable gitter on my computer. I find this process of prototyping very useful.

In regards to my experience with pyday 2, it is quite hard to work for 24 hours on a game, and I am really tired right now, so I am going to hit the hay. However, I think that I will be able to write a game much more effectively next time the competition comes around.