London python dojo pygame write up.
Last night I went to the London python dojo at the Fry IT offices.
The night started with pizza, beer, and nerdy chats with everyone.
Then two lightning talks. The first by @tomviner (Tom), on some funny and useful python modules. `pip install oo && python -moo` Python goes moo (dad joke). `pip install e && python -me 1+2`
Next up was @otfrom (Bruce). He has a cunning plan to work on an engine that could be used later in a cross language dojo to display a game world. @otfrom is trying to see if other language dojos in london are interested in having a bot war tournament in the future. So far the clojure dojo, and perhaps the scala dojo are interested in participating.
@otfrom also announced the London dojos mailing list at: http://groups.google.com/group/london-dojos A group for people interested in programming dojos in london (not just python).
Then 30 of us took an open source game from pygame.org, forked it and hacked on it!
I brought along a big bag of joypad controllers - 30 of them. The idea was to hand out one to each person who turned up. Unfortunately, they were two controllers joined together with one USB cable. Which meant that not everyone got a controller, but 15 people got two!
But first let's rewind to the night before... [[insert tape rewinding sound]] where @ntoll and I were discussing what to do... continue on with the xmas card demo we made last time? Or instead, hack on something a bit more complete?
The more complete game chosen is an over head dungeon crawller type game. It's not at all finished, and is a work progress one. @ntoll selected it from the thousands on pygame.org It seemed to have fairly clean modular code, and be roughly what we were aiming to build.
As is usual of the london python dojos, we split up into groups. Five teams of six people this time. 'Pair programming on steroids - and not in a good way' is how the london python dojo has been described. The room was packed, and most teams split up into two groups of three, with 2-4 laptops per group - some laptops hooked up to larger screens so people a bit further away could have a look.
At the beginning we each got 'Quests', which were little tasks made up by @ntoll.
After coding stopped (@ntoll had to turn the lights off a few times to try and get people to stop)... the groups presented their work. It's a time for reflection and to show off what you did.
Each group managed to accomplish something. However some tasks were a bit harder than others - and they turned into reverse engineering tasks.
So by the end, we had:
A bloody good result really. Especially since it was code no one there had seen (except ntoll, and me a tiny bit), and the groups only had an hour and a half to hack on things, groups with people they never worked with before, using unfamiliar libraries that some hadn't even installed until the dojo (eg, pygame).
I think some people were a little frustrated with their tasks, especially some which were more of a challenge than others. But most seemed to enjoy it.
Overall I think this Dojo was about something which the organiser didn't intend. It was about quickly figuring out a code base, and modifying it. Reading, and modifying other peoples code is a great skill to master - and if nothing this Dojo gave us some experience with that, and let us see how other people do that too.
I saw some people using class browsers I hadn't seen, some using an API from the interpreter, others weilding their custom made code search scripts - to hunt down variables.
At the end of the dojos we usually decide on what we do next. We decided to continue on with the game idea in future dojos - so we can use it in a cross language dojo bot war. We also decided that 'someone' would try and merge all our bits of code together, and that @tjguk (Tim) would present an over view of the code base if he has time at the next dojo.
Unforuntately I couldn't go to the pub afterwards - hopefully next time.
* Tim wrote about the dojo on his blog too.
* @r4vi uploaded some videos http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=63C1FD922FB37B43
The night started with pizza, beer, and nerdy chats with everyone.
Then two lightning talks. The first by @tomviner (Tom), on some funny and useful python modules. `pip install oo && python -moo` Python goes moo (dad joke). `pip install e && python -me 1+2`
Next up was @otfrom (Bruce). He has a cunning plan to work on an engine that could be used later in a cross language dojo to display a game world. @otfrom is trying to see if other language dojos in london are interested in having a bot war tournament in the future. So far the clojure dojo, and perhaps the scala dojo are interested in participating.
@otfrom also announced the London dojos mailing list at: http://groups.google.com/group/london-dojos A group for people interested in programming dojos in london (not just python).
Then 30 of us took an open source game from pygame.org, forked it and hacked on it!
I brought along a big bag of joypad controllers - 30 of them. The idea was to hand out one to each person who turned up. Unfortunately, they were two controllers joined together with one USB cable. Which meant that not everyone got a controller, but 15 people got two!
But first let's rewind to the night before... [[insert tape rewinding sound]] where @ntoll and I were discussing what to do... continue on with the xmas card demo we made last time? Or instead, hack on something a bit more complete?
The more complete game chosen is an over head dungeon crawller type game. It's not at all finished, and is a work progress one. @ntoll selected it from the thousands on pygame.org It seemed to have fairly clean modular code, and be roughly what we were aiming to build.
- @ntoll github crawlr page: https://github.com/ntoll/crawlr
- original crawlr page: https://github.com/axedcode/crawlr
As is usual of the london python dojos, we split up into groups. Five teams of six people this time. 'Pair programming on steroids - and not in a good way' is how the london python dojo has been described. The room was packed, and most teams split up into two groups of three, with 2-4 laptops per group - some laptops hooked up to larger screens so people a bit further away could have a look.
At the beginning we each got 'Quests', which were little tasks made up by @ntoll.
- Add NPC characters that walk randomly around the world
- Add music and sfx for particular events
- Allow the maps to be pre-defined rather than (as is the case) randomly generated each time.
- Add static objects to the game world such as gold or food that get added to the players inventory/energy/score/whatever when they bump into them...
- Two player mode (sharing the same keyboard or with two controllers)
- Menu system (Start Game, Help, Set-up, Quit)
After coding stopped (@ntoll had to turn the lights off a few times to try and get people to stop)... the groups presented their work. It's a time for reflection and to show off what you did.
Each group managed to accomplish something. However some tasks were a bit harder than others - and they turned into reverse engineering tasks.
So by the end, we had:
- joypad control of the main character, starting the game and exiting it.
- A start on multiple player abstraction, from single player. With a small issue that the second player was not displayed on screen for some reason. A separate image is loaded and everything... it's just not displayed.
- An Non Player Character (NPC), that could move and change direction (currently in two separate code bases).
- A start on collision detection of the main character with things on the ground (like mush rooms). As this group was demoing their work, they 'lived coded' up some missing parts of the solution.
- Music, which is different for the main menu screen and the in game music.
- Sound effects, for different actions in the game... and some 'ambient' screams of FEAR and TERROR as the character walks through the forrest.
- Loading and saving of maps into a text based format. Originally the maps are randomly generated, so this needed reverse engineering to figure out how that worked too.
A bloody good result really. Especially since it was code no one there had seen (except ntoll, and me a tiny bit), and the groups only had an hour and a half to hack on things, groups with people they never worked with before, using unfamiliar libraries that some hadn't even installed until the dojo (eg, pygame).
I think some people were a little frustrated with their tasks, especially some which were more of a challenge than others. But most seemed to enjoy it.
Overall I think this Dojo was about something which the organiser didn't intend. It was about quickly figuring out a code base, and modifying it. Reading, and modifying other peoples code is a great skill to master - and if nothing this Dojo gave us some experience with that, and let us see how other people do that too.
I saw some people using class browsers I hadn't seen, some using an API from the interpreter, others weilding their custom made code search scripts - to hunt down variables.
At the end of the dojos we usually decide on what we do next. We decided to continue on with the game idea in future dojos - so we can use it in a cross language dojo bot war. We also decided that 'someone' would try and merge all our bits of code together, and that @tjguk (Tim) would present an over view of the code base if he has time at the next dojo.
Unforuntately I couldn't go to the pub afterwards - hopefully next time.
* Tim wrote about the dojo on his blog too.
* @r4vi uploaded some videos http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=63C1FD922FB37B43
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