Pulling out of the station...

HanClinto on 2008/09/10 20:34 of Team R.E.X.

Well we've got a game idea, a look-and-feel, and a name for our game.

I've spent more time than I probably should have learning Curses to do the ascii graphics, but overall it's working well. Sadly, Curses doesn't work on Windows. So even though my teammate and I are both developing on non-Windows systems (OSX and GNU/Linux respectively) and can run Curses natively, we are targeting the largest demographic of Pyweek developers and players, which is Windows. So in order to keep using curses, we've borrowed and are modifying the Pygame-based Curses emulator that Alya wrote for Isle of the Cursed Phoenix. It's a thin but fantastic piece of code, and it's been great to learn how to use curses while expanding the emulator that Alya started.

Spent too much time doing ascii artwork and animation for our RegEx Express train, but we're pretty excited about the theme and throwback to the old "Conjunction Junction" style rhymes, puns and whatnot.

All aboard!

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Comments

pymike on 2008/09/10 21:00:

OT: I <3 your team name LOL

pymike on 2008/09/10 21:01:

oops I meant you're text train. Comment thing was messing up and I was testing text and hit Save instead of Preview. lol sry

HanClinto on 2008/09/10 21:20:

Thanks, Mike! I look forward to getting it into the game. :)

illume on 2008/09/11 01:33:

hey... there are some curses emulation libraries for windows out there... not sure how good they are. Might be worth a quick search :)

cu.

HanClinto on 2008/09/11 04:30:

@Illume: Thanks for the recommendation -- I looked at one or two. I found the wcurses emulator, but by the author's admission, it sounds far from mature, and I figured that if I needed to implement a feature, that I might be better off going with a simpler framework that I was sure that I could debug.

But perhaps more significantly, wcurses is binary, not a standalone Python file like Alya's emulator, so it would require Windows users to install the library before they could run the game, and I try to avoid that if there's a better option available (though in some cases, with things like Pygame, or physics engines, it's unavoidable).

I did look around for other Pygame based emulators, but wasn't able to find any -- if you know of any, I'd appreciate hearing about it -- I certainly wasn't exhaustive in my search.

Thanks much!