Python Game Challenge by PyDelhi, November 2017
Posted on Sat 11 November 2017 in Meetup
PyDelhi organized Python Game Challenge on 11th November, Saturday, 2017. Here’s what happened!
Python is multi-talented friend of ours which can assist on all our crazy projects irrespective of the type. PyDelhi came up with the idea of showcasing an underrated potential of making games via competition. Participants were asked to follow only 2 rules for doing so
- Game should be developed using Python
- It should be developed on the venue during the given time and there begins the competition. We’ve recorded some of the game pitches by participants and gathered few words from them about their experiences below. And after the pitches we’ll announcing winners later in the blog.
Chessmate
Note from the teammates:
It started 1 Hour late, but the 1 Hour wait was worth it. It started by a talk on Open Source Data, exploring different data sources and Public APIs and how they can be used as a potent tool in a country like India with fewer Hardware resources for countering Air pollution which was at its worst in NCR in the ongoing week.
2 Hours into the challenge, we working on figuring out the design and the schema of the codebase to create the game. An hour later our chessboard was fully functional and we were coding on tasks like-
- Moves validation
- Checkmates
- Knights and Pawn special cases
We finished the game 30 minutes before the end time and performed end to end testing and were the first team to finish and present the hack out of the total two who completed it.
Arrow Monster
Hit and Win
Note from the teammates:
The idea to make this game “thor” is to showcase how easy can it be to interact with physical computing hardware devices with Python programming language, we knew most of the participants if not everyone will be making software games so we decided to make “Thor” a miniature version of hammer game you must have seen/played in arcade game centers.
We made it using Force sensitive resistor as sensor a micro-controller and few LEDs, the score is sent to PC via serial port and a daemon handler written in Python parses that using PySerial library! The result was not perfect but we achieved proof of concept and we will surely work on improving it.
The event was really good and happening, we look forward to attend more such events/hackathons by PyDelhi. Initially we get less support/interests from volunteers who stopped by seeing us playing with circuits on a software based hackathon but when we demonstrated everyone was curious to learn more about our game which was our primary goal! The presentation experience was lukewarm and an area to work on, if it could be more interactive where every team is involved (apart from just judges) asking questions, suggesting improvements it’d be more fun. Cheers to PyDelhi for conducting such a successful event. :)
Maria
Note from the teammates:
It was great pleasure to be a part of this event. I entered in any competition out of my college for the first time and it was a great experience. I just a completion post on meetup group and the main purpose i came there was to see how other people make game. I on the other hand had no knowledge how these games are made.When the event started someone said game can be made only using python as well. I also entered the completion without any knowledge of anything and then i started discussing the game with my partner and started building the game at around 2. I had no knowledge of PyGame so we starting doing what we wanted to instead of making a perfect game.
We first made a base (box) using PyGame, just googled it. Then we started loading images of character, keys and bricks into the box, then wrote an algorithm so that character won’t go out of the box or does not go behind the bricks and a few other things in the remaining time.
But its not about what we did, its about what we learned. With no knowledge of any game library like PyGame we made a small game. Now, when i read a little about PyGame it’s completely clear what were we doing wrong. Overall it was a great experience and the organizers were great as well who gave goodies to participants as well.
Up Up Away
And the winners for Python Game Challenge are Chessmate, Arrow Monster and Hit and Win. Congratulations to all the participants who won and thank you all for coming to the PyDelhi meetup. Keep in touch on our meetup, twitter and facebook page for updates on upcoming events.