To play the game, you'll need to connect to http://textsmith.org.

There's not a lot there at the moment, but we'll be building out the six literary worlds over the coming days... and you're welcome to contribute too. We've written some simple documentation to get you started, although we totally concede that the TextSmith "engine" still needs plenty of refinement.

After some rather subtle problems with Heroku, Gandi based A records and websockets (connections were getting dropped after 55 seconds), I've migrated to a small EC2 instance running on AWS, so please treat it with care. If you get errors please ping me via Twitter (@ntoll). The side-effect is we don't automagically get HTTPS connections, so (sadly) your password will be transmitted in the clear. Please just use a throw away password for connecting to the game for testing purposes.

This has been my favourite PyWeek (my third so far). I'm definitely going to continue with the TextSmith code, it needs refactoring and there are a bunch of gremlins I want to fix. It'll probably be a complete re-write with copious amounts of code-reuse from this original version, but without this first draft, I wouldn't be in a position to understand and see where improvements can be made.

Finally, all the other entries I've submitted in previous PyWeeks have built upon some sort of existing library (e.g. the amazing PyGameZero). This entry was completely written from scratch. The only third party modules are Quart (used for very basic web-facing stuff like static templates and the websockets) and the Python Markdown module (for rendering user generated content).

My favourite part of PyWeek comes next, exploring, playing, enjoying and commenting on all the other entries. This is a source of joyful silliness.

As always, thanks to Dan Pope for making all this happen.