The End?

TheKing on 2024/03/23 22:58 of The Pythons
— edited on 2024/03/23 22:59

First and last diary entry of pyweek. I had randomly found about this game jam when I joined python's discord a few weeks ago, just to see if it would be useful in my journey. When I heard about it I asked a school mate to join me in an attempt to make a game as we had both been independently learning pygame, he was up for it and here we are. This is my experience of pyweek (won't be mentioning the progress Xrunfun and SirBilby made, that's for them to publish)

Day 1: We were hoping for petri dish to win the votes but alas it was boring, old "tube". Of course, being british ourselves, we decided to base our game off of the London underground! We'd agreed to make a 2d top down style game as Xrunfun had some code he thought he could change to fit that style. Meanwhile, I started building a basic menu system for the project as I had done so before in another game

Day 2: Continued working on that menu system. Turned out the 2d top down style was unexpectedly difficult to implement properly as none of us were experienced with it so instead decided to go with my idea for a street fighter like game. Also continued debating about the overall plan for the game, making sure it would be perfect.

Day 3: Was mostly busy this day, did little work on the menu stuff.

Day 4: After looking at Xrunfun's latest code I felt it was too messy and disorganised as he did not know how to use classes and functions. This led me to begin trying to convert his code into something more manageable by using classes for some of the code for the players. Otherwise I did a bit of work on the menu but wasn't a very productive day.

Day 5: I had come up with a very rudimentary plan for how the screen for the main game would look and made some suggestions for how the train would move across the screen (don't think anyone actually used it or was able to). I almost completed converting Felix's code into classes and functions.

Day 6: After finishing converting Xrunfun's code, I thought it looked good, perfect even, but turned out there was a game-breaking bug which I could not fix no matter what I tried. Occasionally I wonder what caused it and if I pick this project up again after this is over I might try having another shot at it.

Day 7: The Mad Scramble! After 1 last hopeless hour of trying to fix the bug I gave up. Instead I focused my efforts on finishing my part of the code (the menu system). I got most of my plan completed and in my opinion it looks superb! I spent another 2 hours merging it with Xrunfun's code and making some final touches. 

Overall this was a fun challenge! We knew we would never win, having seen veteran coders build incredible 3d games with path-tracking and other various wonders. For just a few novices with limited time due to dreadful exams, I would say we did quite well and I would like to thank Xrunfun and SirBilby for their tremendous help - without them I'd likely not had the motivation nor the time to get even this far in the project!