making apps, making webs.

hOur Factory is a Melbourne arts festival of sorts that I'm involved with. Unlike most arts festivals, or parties hOur Factory lets interested people vote, and chose the theme. hOur Factory is an exhibition of arts, a warehouse party, and a film night all held in a big space on March 1st. It will have a gallery opening feel, and then move into performances, and music. Depending on the theme, I might be working on a project with 28 monitors and a whole lot of webcams. The idea is to form them into a sphere like shape, and have the monitors pointing outwards. So it could act as a spherical mirror of sorts. However the possibilities are quite large. It's going to be made from cheap $5 webcams, and recycled monitors that we hope to get for free (since so many people are throwing out their old CRT monitors). I should be using pygame to drive the displays... maybe doing some real time effects on them if there is enough processing power. I already have six CRT monitors, but I w...

This is a game made to the theme of sheep. This game is about sheep poo, and grass. You play the part of a sheep, against a friend sitting at the same keyboard as you. You must eat the grass on the opponents side of the screen, whilst pooing on your grass so it grows quicker. It's a resource game really. You need to make the trade of between blocking the other sheep, eating the other sheeps grass, and pooing on your grass. My Evil sheep picture for the intro. I think the sheep is possessed by satan. Maybe. Or maybe it's just angry all it's lambs have been taken to be eaten. Not sure why it's angry really. As you can see I didn't have time to draw any good looking sheep - so there's just stick figure sheep. Stick sheep that poo. You can download the source for python+pygame here. http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/stuff/bleten.tar.gz http://rene.f0o.com/~rene/stuff/bleten.zip Ludumdare is where people make games from scratch in 48 hours. A single person does al...

I haven't read this book about making games with python and pygame yet, but I think it seems like a good one for beginners. The free chapter is fun to read. Which is the essence of making games I think. It should be entertaining to make a game, and to read about making games. This book looks like it covers most basics of programming a game - with python and pygame. Like it's title suggests it is for beginners, which is great.

Have a look at PyGPU http://code.google.com/p/pygpu/ With it you can code the GPU using python. It translates code from python into GLSL (the opengl shading language). It's amazing what type of algorithms you can quickly write using the GPU these days. There are papers describing it's implementation and other information here: http://www.cs.lth.se/home/Calle_Lejdfors/pygpu/ It takes a similar approach to psyco or pypy... in a way. But is different from both of these. Very cool.

I saw this on the pygame mailing list the other day about girlstart.org ... "... Project IT Girl, a program that teaches 60 high school girls in Austin, Texas, about how they can change the world through the use of technology. This year, Project IT Girls learn basic programming through designing and developing their own unique educational games written with Python and **Pygame**! ..." Looks like a cool project.

After the Galcon T shirt design competition, Phil has decided to send me one of the winning designed shirts for helping out with testing. You can see some of the winning designs here: Galcon t shirts . Galcon is a multiplayer, and single player game kind of like risk, but with space ships. It's made with python + pygame by Phil Hassey.