Wanted to share a quote on this week's theme:

"That’s the real issue this time,” he said. “Beating Nixon.  It’s hard to even guess how much damage those bastards will do if they get in for another four years.”   The argument was familiar, I had even made it myself, here and there, but I was beginning to sense something very depressing about it.  How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame, but “regrettably necessary” holding actions?  And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the at least 20 million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?  

Now with another one of these big bogus showdowns looming down on us, I can already pick up the stench of another bummer.  I understand, along with a lot of other people, that the big thing this year is Beating Nixon.  But that was also the big thing, as I recall, twelve years ago in 1960 – and as far as I can tell, we’ve gone from bad to worse to rotten since then, and the outlook is for more of the same. "

  —Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 

It got me thinking. The typical RPG has a group of "Heros" go around the world murdering as many "enemies" as they can in order to destroy the evil ruler...

What if our "Heros" are actually sociopaths, and upon gaining power, "enemies" become more and more terrorizing, requiring yet greater "Heros" to destroy them.

Still hoping there's enough time to throw something together on this.

I spent the whole day working on getting something going. I thought I would build a little momentum. But I couldn't even load a tmx script that I was planning on using. I went through Richard's tutorials and tried using his tmx script in there. I kept getting arcane errors for my maps. I don't think it even works on maps that have a Tiled Layer Format other than zlib compressed. At one point I got an error that a method needed EXACTLY 1 argument. When I tried to find a way to send one argument, I was told it needed 2 OR MORE arguments. When I changed it back, it needed exactly 1 again.

So, I may have a hard time pumping something out over the next few days. I will be lucky if I don't smash my head against the wall for that matter.

In the meantime, I am going to just review some other code. I would really like to move forward on the game, but I just don't think that it's going to be as simple as I thought to get Tiled to play nicely with me.

If anyone has any suggestions to make this easier, please tell.

Halfway through the competition and I am considering something much easier. Tiled files are just not working for me. I get to creating blockers and trying to create interactive points on the map and I end up with a program that doesn't work. 

I am thinking, one screen, a few sprites, something simple. Then maybe I will move on to something bigger.

I have been making small steps in the right direction. However, I didn't really know much about pygames coming in, so it's been a steep learning curve.

I will say a few things. The feedback loop with pygames is terrible. Instead of the beautifully simple feedback loop of a REPL or notebook, pygames feedback loop loads the pygame screen, and at times, crashes it which requires a force quit. Sometimes, as in the case of loading a tmx file, the stacktrace gives very poor information about what is happening. I haven't seen many games that are included in these challenges include any sort of logging or testing code as part of the project. I'm not sure how complicated that would be...

Coming up with an idea is tough. The most simple and interesting games, may be neither simple nor interesting when implemented. I keep trying to come up with a game that could fit my limited knowledge at this point, since it may be better that trying to expand my knowledge to create the game. Although, a bigger map might be beneficial, more game with less code. Let's just say I'll be lucky if I push out a game in the next 46 hours.

All in all, I am learning a lot. I have worked with python a decent amount already, but I am seeing situations while developing here where Object Oriented Program is a necessity, rather than a nice to have feature of clean code.

Well, I created a game, start to finish, that has some simple interfaces, and an objective, and something to avoid. It is a complete game. It is somewhat fun and difficult.

I did a majority of the development in the last 48 hours. I was done before the deadline and had a brain freeze about zipping the files into a single upload. I uploaded the script instead, which is identical to the one in the zip, but doesn't include sprites and backgrounds. So please accept the zip.

I worked through a lot of the tutorials by Richard Jones, but also confronted some unique problems to create transitions from scene to scene. I didn't want to create a new set of classes for scenes and instead set flags and used events. It was an effective method, but not super clean. It worked for the simplicity of my program. And I was able to make the structure relatively consistent.

I hope this is enjoyable. My wife had acted as my tester and said I needed a weapon for defense, though I didn't have the time to add it. In the mean time, you are going to have to just run away and hide.

The lesser of two evils certainly does not get to fight back! Run away and hide my friends! Good Luck.