- Finishing FastBlocks
- Plans for the next project
At the moment, it looks like this:
You can download the whole repository at https://github.com/fastpath/FastBlocks, when you click on the "zip"-button upper left, and don't forget to read the Readme! ;) And don't forget to send me some feedback or bugs, which you have noticed. :)
And now, let's dive into the details of how I "finished" my project:
- I needed to create some graphics and actually ended up with some "Programmer Art" ;) But it's a start and when I get the right idea, it will be updated! Because of the games' ability to be configurated by the xml-File, one can change the images to his favorites.
- But the biggest part was creating the distribution for windows. The pygame community offers the nice script Pygame2exe, which seems to be a wrapper for diskutils, specialized for pygames. First one has to insert some informations like the authors' name, description an version number. And further, the additional data files and used scripts have to be defined. So the important parts to fill are self.script - the starting script, self.extra_datas - the name of the folder for ressources (e.g. "data") and self.extra_scripts - the name of the additional scripts (e.g. the outsourced class-scripts). Then the file pygame2exe.py should be placed in the root-directory and one can try to execute it. I experienced problems with that and realized that important points for distributing a pygame to windows are:
- install Python version 2.5.4 (32-Bit) and Pygame version 1.9.1 (32-Bit)
- change your file-path commands from main_dir = os.path.split(os.path.abspath(__file__))[0] to main_dir = os.path.dirname(unicode(sys.executable, sys.getfilesystemencoding( )))
- Some bug-testing and writing a basic Readme for your project is very helpful, too. I showed the program to a friend and was very relieved, that it started without fixing this or that. :)
And for this I want to change my development tools to C++ and the SDL-Library (which is wrapped by pygame) for no dramatic reasons. I tested some SDL examples and they worked pretty well on my PC and Mac. At the moment I do some brainstorming for the features of BreakFast and diving into SDL. You will hear of me in the next days (or weeks :P) and take some time to read:
- http://www.sdltutorials.com/
- http://lazyfoo.net/index.php - a very good page which seems to follow the same goals as mine, but with way better SDL-tutorials and more experience ;)
- http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ - a regulary challenge for all game developers to create a game in 2 days or earn 1$ with your game for example
