Decent at Python, noob at game dev

Aexis Rai on 2012/05/08 22:12

Ok, so...

I'm Aexis. I have decent experience with Python and I've made some games with it, but I've never used any of the popular libraries. That is to say, I've never made a game with graphics or sound. Yep. All-text terminal games.

This is my first game compo, period. I've had a tab with the Pygame site open for some time, and when I saw something on the news posts about a game compo I clicked the link and ended up here. I signed up and completely forgot that I have a lot of other things to do this week...

So since the first few days I didn't have time for/forgot PyWeek, if I make and release any game it'll be basic. But the primary thing is that I do have a Python text adventure game... thing (it's not a proper library because you can't import things from it, but it is a framework) that I was interested in using. It's called pystage. (I adopted the lowercase naming convention because it looked consistent.

By the competition rules, that might count as a codebase, but it's just a basic structure to follow to get the game to work the way most TAGs do. And I was interested in releasing that, too, but I'm not sure through what channels I'd go about doing that. I'm hoping, then, that this Discussion board is similar to a forum.

For anyone who could answer:
1. Does this discussion-board/forum stay open after this PyWeek ends? If not, is there another place on or related to this site I can go to continue publicly and perhaps collaboratively working on pystage?
2. I am doing all of my stuff in Python 3.2.3. Would the majority of PyWeek prefer I use Python 2.x?
3. Seriously, pystage is just "start with a few variables, go into a few major while loops, then make the rooms into if blocks, getting input from the player with a basic input() prompt, etc." (3.x replaced raw_input() with input().) Can I use it and not be called a cheater?

More questions later. Thanks in advance.

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Comments

DangerOnTheRagr on 2012/05/08 23:55:

  1. Yes, I believe it does.
  2. Probably so - I've never seen a Python 3 entry here - but it's a minor inconvenience at best
  3. I can't answer that - that would be better left to richard to answer (his email is at the bottom of the pyweek site)
Good luck with your text adventure game!

richard on 2012/05/09 00:15:

  1. Yes it does, but it's quiet (though there is an RSS feed people can subscribe for new posts.)
  2. It's time people moved on :-)
  3. Yeah, that's very close to cheating if you use a bunch of code that no-one else has access to that you wrote before the comp. On the other hand we're not really all that strict around here :-)

CrazyPyro on 2012/05/09 05:17:

2.  I wish.  Seems every time I try, I run into *yet another* library that doesn't work with it. :-\

mauve on 2012/05/09 06:37:

If it's "just start with a few variables, jump into a few loops" then there's a lot to be said for a complete rewrite for Pyweek. It will ensure you a) are not cheating and b) make it better/learn from your experience.

I'm pretty sick of rewriting the same(ish) stuff time and time again now, but on the other hand I have a good picture of how to write various components well - good approaches versus bad, what features are needed, etc. It's probably time I created a proper tested/documented library for some of my code.