Developing a Developer: Weekly Report 6

I've finished the first book. It's been as good as I remembered. It's been a hard week. I'm having many assignments at college and I think I'll have to slower the pace. Anyway, let's get started.

Platforms

Download the Windows executable here

Download the source code here

Last week I posted the source code of platforms, the adventures of a green square in a dungeon. I've finished the game and the old green square has evolved: now it's a raccoon.

If you look at the source code, you can see that the raccoon is composed of several images. Each image represents an action. One image represents standing, another for jumping and, finally, four for walking. I've experienced the following challenges:

• Making the raccoon walk at the proper pace. At first, the raccoon images alternated to fast in comparison with the distance than it actually walked. This is because I made the images change every frame. I changed it to one image every four frames.
• Making the raccoon “look” at the right direction. This is easily achieved through a Pygame built-in function: “pygame.transform.flip”. Although this is very easy, I had to be very careful storing directions in variables for the raccoon to remember where was looking at after walking.
• Making the raccoon “fit” in the old square. Well, this is not the actual challenge, the thing is that my old green square was 20x20 pixels large. The raccoon looked so small in it... Well, I ended up changing the player square size to 50x50. This was tedious, because I had to change the entire level for the player to fit in the space between the first platform and the staircase... Lesson learnt the hard way.

I enjoyed the part of searching files for my game. It's amazing the amount of open resources available on the Internet.

Windows executables

This part took me a lot of time. The author of the book teaches us how to use a script to convert Python scripts into Windows executables. It hasn't work with my Pygame applications. In fact, it doesn't work with the author's scripts. In the past I used the book's method and I didn't encounter any of these problems. Something has changed either in py2exe or in Pygame. Apparently the problem is related with the font and mixer modules.

Gladly, someone else found this problem first and posted a solution. Check the link: http://www.pygame.org/wiki/Pygame2exe. I decided to use my own font file instead of the default. It works.

Honestly, I would like to hide every file that there's in the distribution but the exe file. This would keep things simple for the user. There must be a way to do this.

I got to understand a little about distributing applications in this pdf: http://cs.iupui.edu/~aharris/pygame/Appendix_C.pdf. However, I feel quite intimidated about the distutils Python module. My old C and Ada compilers output the executable with a single command. Having to write a setup script is quite strange for me. Perhaps I'll need to take a look at it in the future.