Category archives: Young Coders

Working on some refactoring today around the saving/restoring/initialising code for Productive. I'm trying to keep the "Map" class fairly generic, so that teachers and students can write more interesting map types later on. Part of that is deciding which parts of the setup are configurable in the map.

If we make every little setting configurable ...

Been working on the simulation code for Productive. Interesting thing is, even without the movement rules (all movements are instant right now) the game play almost works. That is, you can take over someone else's unit, you can build the cities, have to manage your resources, etceteras.

Doing something wrong with the scrolling code in ...

At some point we should see if we can convince the Python DBUS peoples to expose a method which lets one write a mainloop in Python. That would let Pygame scripts use the DBUS (and thus Telepathy) module natively, rather than having to integrate multiple mainloops in every application.

Yes, yes, I know threading works, ...

Games which are animation and graphics heavy, and which want to allow for heavy customisation and reuse, normally need to be able to manage collections of images which are not known at design time. You want something that lets you specify an abstract identifier and get back an appropriate version of the image for your ...

Was a bit fried today, so wound up spending the bulk of it in little errands and relaxing. The weekend was fun, and I've been smiling all day about it. That said, didn't actually get much new done on the game. I did get the licensing issues sorted out.

One note to people running Jams/Sprints: ...

This was a random thought I had as I was reading the morning's news (yes, morning, bit late today), particularly the survey showing Americans think they spend 25% of their budget on NASA. I, of course, immediately begin thinking of ways to show users in productive where their money was going... and went far-to-far... still, ...

We now have a low-level renderer that loads the artwork and renders the simulation results for territories and tiles when the simulation is running directly in the process. Basically, in an incredibly round-about way, you can see the grass grow, and you can see the crops disappear as the workers harvest them, but that's all ...

Graphics (art) is right on Track. Miguel has been working steadily and consistently, he's got the first couple of teams under control, has the board designs, just execution there. He's even talking about whether he'll be able to get to more player icons than the initial two.

Networking was touch and go, but Andrew and ...

First evening of the Game Jam is coming to a close. We've chosen a game from the 3 final contenders:

* Collaborative Platformer, one draws, one runs (various mechanics proposed wrt how the drawing occurs, how scoring occurs etc.)
* Productive, simplified Real Time Strategy (on the wiki already)
* Collaboration, collaborative drawing/racing game (Ryan ...

Just downloaded and installed the Sugar packages for Ubuntu (Gutsy). Seems to have simply worked out-of-the-box, just click "install, apply-updates" and a few minutes later there's the Sugar environment. Still need to see if everything works and I can add my own activities, but promising looking. If it worked on Gentoo too I'd be ...