PostPyWeek & Lunar Delivery

bencoder on 2008/09/16 20:40 of SINAA- Lunar Delivery

Ok, well it's been over for a few days now. I had fun, although illness caused the week to be very draining. I started off with a few ideas with none of them well formed and not really any idea of how i'd go about implementing them. So I decided I'd start with a rope simulation. This used up two days (1st day using euler method, 2nd day rewriting using verlet integration which worked a lot better). Now I had a wobbly springy string with nothing to do with it.

Fleshing up a simple game around picking objects up and moving them about using your awkward springy rope, I came up with the idea for lunar delivery and came up with lots of ideas for the game that never got implemented at all. No matter... here's a few things I have learned:

Do physics after the concept. Perhaps this isn't always the right idea, but my game suffered because I was so focussed on the rope physics that I couldn't come up with any idea that didn't use it. I personally think the most fun entrys this pyweek were really the ones that didn't use rope physics. This is perhaps because not having to deal with physics frees up a lot of time to work on a better idea and more gameplay elements. Or perhaps because rope is kind of boring.

Fun - I don't think my game was all that fun, and related to the above.. I really should have come up with a fun idea first, rather than trying to come up with an idea around a rather boring toy physics thing.

I need to learn python - Similar to another post I saw on here, I realised that I wasn't really coding in python at all, I was merely coding in any other language and translating it over, so my code didn't use any nifty python features and tricks, because I didn't know them. At least this pyweek has got me more into python so that I can work on this for the future.

I will definitely be joining in more programming competitions, pyweek and others hopefully, and will hopefully be able to build up a catalog of things I have made

Any comments on my game would be appreciated, I know the concept wasn't that fun, but if you can think of ways that it could have been better, I'd love to know :) If you don't understand anything as well, just ask here and i'll try and help you.