Pyweek Was Brutal
Pyweek: a week long contest to develop a game in python. Sounds fun right? I thought it did. I'll tell you right now, that it was brutal; but ultimately, even though I didn't even submit my code for review, I think I accomplished a lot.Pyweek Objectives
You have one week to develop a game in python. The contest's theme is voted on one week before the contest starts. This keeps things fair so there is nobody working on their projects before the contest starts. You are allowed to use any libraries specified on pyweek's rules page. All graphics and music must be created by you for the contest. That's about it in a nutshell, there's a lot more detail on the pyweek site.My Objectives
- Learn a python game library.
Yes, that's right, I entered a contest to learn. I like challenges and feel like I needed something like this to push me to learn. - Survive.
You really need to use the entire week
One week. That's all you get. From 00:00 UTC September 11 until 23:59 UTC September 17 is all the time you will get. Now, to paint a picture of my week, here was what my schedule looked like:Sunday: housework all day, ~10pm EST start some pyweek work write up some game ideas
Monday: work -- start getting sick, though a little bit of pygame learning
Tuesday: work -- still sick
Wednesday: work --still sick
Thursday: work --still sick, but able to do a little bit of pygame tutorials to keep learning
Friday: work - pyweek work
Saturday: pyweek work
Fighting a cold for time is seriously an uphill struggle. If you're sick, stay in bed to rest up.
A Failure at Pyweek, A Success At Learning
So as I stated earlier, I never even submitted my code for review. I was not able to get as far as I would have liked to, though for my objectives, I think I did well. The theme for Pyweek was "mutate"; I had a basic idea and I tried to keep things simple, but apparently not simple enough. Well, not simple for someone who is just learning the pygame library.I learned a lot in this short time and I am ultimately happy that I at least have something a little bit playable. Crappy, yes. But hey, I made it and I made every piece of it; from code to background music, to little character gifs, I made them all. And for that reason, if someone ever asks me if I've ever created a game, "why yes! yes, I did!" You can checkout my Pyweek diaries here and check out all of the entries here. There are some really awesome games out there, go check them out! Congrats to all Pyweek contestants!
