Re: The first pygame 2 community game. Are you in? Re: [pygame] Re: About Pygame development

[René Dudfield]

Hello,

so the game jam happened, and more than 14 people took part in making
stuntcat ‍.

Already we have learnt a lot, and used those learnings to drive pygame 2
development.
More info here: https://www.pygame.org/news/2019/1/stuntcat

The first pygame 2 community game. Are you in? Re: [pygame] Re: About Pygame development

[René Dudfield]

What is a ‍? *[0].

Following on from the "About Pygame development
" email
thread...


One topic of that conversation was doing a community game in there for
reasons(see below).

I would like to do a *pygame 2 community game* to submit in the:

   - https://ldjam.com/
   - https://itch.io/jam/game-off-2018 (GameOff github jam)

Ludumdare(ldjam) starts in 3 days, 7 hours. Theme not selected yet.
GameOff finishes in 4 days 2 hours. *Theme is "Hybrid*", Jam already
started.

So, the Jams finish in 4.1 days.

Are you in?
If so join the web based chatroom (discord) in
the "#communitygame" channel.
Our repo: https://github.com/pygame/stuntcat

I'm trying to form a team now.

... read more?...

click
loading...
loading...
buffering...
loading...
refresh...
loading...


So why do this?
My reasons for doing this are to push me to get pygame 2 features done that
are actually useful in apps (Write Games, Not Engines
).
It will be a good testbed for prototyping as well.

I will also try to get the game into Steam, and any other app stores.
Because distributing pygame 2 games is also important,
and improving the tooling and documentation around that is also important.

The pygame 2 community game serves these purposes.

   - guiding and motivating pygame 2 development (make games not engines)
   - raising funds towards pygame 2 developments (or losing money on steam
   signup costs)
   - making an open source pygame 2 game
   - improving the work flow for people releasing games/apps.
   - helping to guide improvements on the pygame website
   - trying out new technology and techniques

It's about 4-5 days, and then there will be some more days to try and
distribute the game further.

- License for code will be the pygame license (LGPL, but you can keep your
parts of course!)
- Art assets license will be some form of permissive creative commons. So
technically anyone should be able to distribute it following those licenses
(and even sell it).

Contributors will also:

   - be in the credits on the pygame website, game website, in game, promo
   pages
   - have their link (to patreon twitter github etc) in their too
   - hopefully enjoy themselves, and maybe learn something

Also interested in people who want this game to use their library.
Especially if you will us use the library or improve it as part of the Jam.



Anyone who wants to be involved can join the discord channel
web based chatroom (discord) in the
"#communitygame" channel.
Please let us know if you want to be involved and how :)
*[0] (We came up with a repo name... we were perhaps thinking something
like "Speedy the stunt cat" or "stuntcat" Did you know there is this whole
weird genre of stunt cat games, and that stunt cat emojis are a thing?
‍ Also, @claudeb's first cat was called Speedy, and was a stunt cat. So
that's the repo name. )



--
*This email in webpage form:*

*https://renesd.blogspot.com/2018/11/first-pygame-2-community-game-starting.html
*

Re: [pygame] Re: About Pygame development

[René Dudfield]

(Oops. Somehow I didn't press send on this reply it seems.)
--

Hello!

Don't think I was at the dojo for that one, but it does sound fun.
Well, I do remember one where we made a random maze generator.
Maybe that was part of it?
Also there was a pyweek when some ldndojo people tried to make a game
called:
Woger the Wibblly Wobbly Wombat.
8 years ago now!? wow

Yeah, ok... good idea about putting that in a blog post.
I'd be interested to read something on your experiences too :)

Yeah, the "Big Buck Bunny" film was one of the blender open projects.
Ton(another tall Dutch person) of Blender wrote some interesting essays
about it back in the day,
but I can't find them at the moment.
I did find this 'The making of Big Buck Bunny' thing on youtube which was
interesting.
There are some parts about involvement of the community.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8iM8kAJOw

But they have done several more since then, so perhaps they have more
'making of's or post mortems out there.
(here is Making of Agent 327, their 2017 short they are hoping to turn into
a feature film next)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKlgCnp_57M
So that took them 10 years to get up to trying to make a movie from all
those short films.

There were definitely many UX improvements after and during these projects
to Blender.
I just read they have some sort of 'cloud' subscriptions which they say is
their biggest income now.
But I guess they hope the movie will sell,
and let them move up to a planned 10 developers working on Blender for the
Institute.
https://www.blender.org/institute/
https://www.blender.org/foundation/



This is the Gimp animation project patreon page has interesting posts about
their gimp work:
https://www.patreon.com/zemarmot/posts
And on their blog(starting 2012). It shows they are a major contributor for
Gimp of recent.
https://girinstud.io/news/2018/04/zemarmot-main-contributor-of-gimp-2-10-0-rc1/

And yeah, they helped with a whole bunch of UX improvements and pushed Gimp
through to a release (after 6 years of big internal changes).
Despite the tiny amount of funding, they made a massive impact to Gimp.
Little things like 'recovery on crash', and 'do not wait until all fonts
are read before app can be used' are what
you need when you are using it in production. You also need to release it.


cheers,



On Wed, Aug 22, 2018 at 12:56 PM Nicholas H.Tollervey 
wrote:

> Rene,
>
> The OP is wonderful to read, and so much of it chimes with my experience
> in floss development. Perhaps turn it into a blog post so people can
> point to it and share it?
>
> I love Thomas's idea of a PyGame "game" - it reminds me of Blender's
> "Big Buck Bunny" film where all the assets, source and so on were made
> available so people could see "how it was done" with Blender.
>
> Do you remember in the early days of the London Python Code Dojo we
> collaboratively created a text based adventure game? Each month we'd
> choose an aspect of such a game, make it work in groups and then, at the
> end of the show and tell, merge the democratically elected "blessed"
> solution to become the basis of the next month's task. Might that be a
> modus operandi for such a game?
>
> Just throwing out thoughts...
>
> N.
>
> On 22/08/18 11:24, René Dudfield wrote:
> > Weatbag is a funny name, in the best ever way :)
> > Yeah, this sounds like a interesting idea.
> > Where each person can create a different module for a separate part of
> > the game world.
> >
> > I think the reddit group tried a couple of collaborative games too.
> > I'm pretty sure minecraft came about as part of this idea of a
> > collaborative game.
> > At the time there was a python game where people could also write bots
> > that would battle each other.
> >
> > Yeah, could lord.mauve be convinced to do such a game in pyweek?
> > Pretty fun idea IMHO.
> >
> >
> > ---
> >
> > But the direction I was thinking of was more in the line of the Blender
> > short films (open projects).
> > https://www.blender.org/about/projects/
> >
> > This would be a commercial project funded by either a publisher, crowd
> > funding, grants, or some combination of these.
> > The team would be made up from people in the pygame community. A
> > pyweek/ludumdare winner as programmer and designer, a musician
> > (hopefully someone using pygame to make music!), a gfx artist(again
> > someone using pygame), someone working on pygame tools to support the
> > production, and perhaps someone working on project management and
> marketing.
> > In the same way as the Blender open short film projects work, pygame
> > development by the tools programmer would be driven by the games needs,
> > and then these improvements would be available for other people using
> > pygame. Also, the resulting game should hopefully be of higher quality
> > than other productions. And of course it would be an open project
> > (transparent, and the results released as FLOSS).
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tuesday, August 21, 2018, 

[pygame] Re: About Pygame development

[René Dudfield]

Weatbag is a funny name, in the best ever way :)
Yeah, this sounds like a interesting idea.
Where each person can create a different module for a separate part of the
game world.

I think the reddit group tried a couple of collaborative games too.
I'm pretty sure minecraft came about as part of this idea of a
collaborative game.
At the time there was a python game where people could also write bots that
would battle each other.

Yeah, could lord.mauve be convinced to do such a game in pyweek?
Pretty fun idea IMHO.


---

But the direction I was thinking of was more in the line of the Blender
short films (open projects).
https://www.blender.org/about/projects/

This would be a commercial project funded by either a publisher, crowd
funding, grants, or some combination of these.
The team would be made up from people in the pygame community. A
pyweek/ludumdare winner as programmer and designer, a musician (hopefully
someone using pygame to make music!), a gfx artist(again someone using
pygame), someone working on pygame tools to support the production, and
perhaps someone working on project management and marketing.
In the same way as the Blender open short film projects work, pygame
development by the tools programmer would be driven by the games needs, and
then these improvements would be available for other people using pygame.
Also, the resulting game should hopefully be of higher quality than other
productions. And of course it would be an open project (transparent, and
the results released as FLOSS).







On Tuesday, August 21, 2018, Thomas Kluyver  wrote:

> Thanks René,
>
> I think there's a lot of interesting ideas in your message. One in
> particular that caught my attention:
>
> On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 at 17:24, René Dudfield  wrote:
>
>> It could be pretty Epic to have some sort of 'pygame community game'.
>>
>
> A few years back, I tried to make a collaboratively developed text
> adventure game which I called Weatbag, for 'Written by everyone all
> together, the big adventure game'. It didn't really go anywhere, but I
> learned that the idea wasn't new - people called such games Multi-User
> Dungeons, or MUDs. I still think it could be a really fun idea, and I'd be
> interested to see it extended to a game with simple graphics.
>
> The idea with Weatbag was that the user could move between squares on a
> NESW grid, with the information about each square stored in a separate
> module. Any square which didn't already exist could be claimed by
> submitting a pull request to add something there. I wonder if it would be
> possible to do something similar with a graphical game? Maybe with a
> collection of sprites and textures to use so people could compose a simple
> scene without having to create new artwork?
>
> Maybe this could be a fun project for a future pyweek or something - put
> together enough of a game to be playable, and build a framework for outside
> contributors to easily extend the game after the contest.
>
> Thomas
>

Re: [pygame] Re: About Pygame development

[Thomas Kluyver]

Thanks René,

I think there's a lot of interesting ideas in your message. One in
particular that caught my attention:

On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 at 17:24, René Dudfield  wrote:

> It could be pretty Epic to have some sort of 'pygame community game'.
>

A few years back, I tried to make a collaboratively developed text
adventure game which I called Weatbag, for 'Written by everyone all
together, the big adventure game'. It didn't really go anywhere, but I
learned that the idea wasn't new - people called such games Multi-User
Dungeons, or MUDs. I still think it could be a really fun idea, and I'd be
interested to see it extended to a game with simple graphics.

The idea with Weatbag was that the user could move between squares on a
NESW grid, with the information about each square stored in a separate
module. Any square which didn't already exist could be claimed by
submitting a pull request to add something there. I wonder if it would be
possible to do something similar with a graphical game? Maybe with a
collection of sprites and textures to use so people could compose a simple
scene without having to create new artwork?

Maybe this could be a fun project for a future pyweek or something - put
together enough of a game to be playable, and build a framework for outside
contributors to easily extend the game after the contest.

Thomas

[pygame] Re: About Pygame development

[René Dudfield]

Hello,

this is a response to questions like:

'how do we speed up pygame development,
is it a volunteer project,
and would funding like a patreon help?'



It's a fairly commonly asked set of questions. Because I guess people would
like pygame development to happen faster.
It's an almost entirely an unfunded volunteer effort.
There are some small exceptions like the Google Summer of Code in the past,
and some people have made money selling education products like books,
or get invited to conferences to talk about pygame things. But most pygame
development is unfunded.

So that means people give up time they could be earning money in a job,
time with families and all that other life stuff.

So, what can we do to speed up development?

Now that pygame 1.9.4 is out I'm going to help out with the SDL2 and
'pygame 2' stuff that Lenard has been working on.
This has me more excited than in a long while to play with all the new
things. And for volunteer projects, that's important.
Making it a joyful, and welcoming place to do stuff in is important. As is
making sure people get some thanks and credit for their work.

The work that Thomas and others have done with the CI should help us a lot.
But we can improve that further still by *moving to continuous deployment*.
So every PR merged sends development builds to pypi.
I guess what I'm saying is, making releases take less time to put together
makes it quicker to do releases.
Sounds like an obvious thing to say(and it is), but it's worth pointing out
as a goal.
And a first step of automating processes is to write them down, which is
what happened with the last pygame release.

Soon, I'll announce a '*python artist in residence grant*',
and donating some money to someone working on python/pygame related art
projects.
I did already plan to announce the first recipient of this, but they are
busy at the moment.
Why this? I feel the python world largely ignores the contributions that
the game development, graphics, education, music and the arts provides for
python. People who make games, music, and art have contributed really major
things to the python world. And the python website doesn't even mention
that art or games are a thing. We don't exist apparently.
An artist residency usually works something like a person does some time in
either a gallery making something to present or in a music club doing a
weekly spot.
Because it will initially be a small amount of money, the pygame one will
only be a month long.
It will be for someone who is already doing stuff with pygame or python in
their arts practice.
There will be a little thumbnail on the website linking towards an artist
statement/patreon page/blog or some such.


Another thing is *making it easier to contribute*. The move to github from
bitbucket,
automating the build process, and releasing the website as python was
supposed to help with this.
But still contributions are still very small. There is still lots of work
to improve things here.

What else can we try to speed things up?

Also, I worked *updating the developer guide* on the wiki,
and also marked a number of easy issues up with 'first good issue'.
However, some contributors still don't know what even a unit test is, or
how to write them,
or how to write them with pygame.
So, the final piece is to finish a guide on how to write unit tests, and
pygame.
I've made a prominent link on the home page for how to contribute to pygame
the library.
There's also a banner on import pygame now linking to the contribute page.
(Appologies if it annoys you. To disable edit the pygame/__init__.py file).
(If we get to pygame 2, then I think we can remove that banner.)
And there are a few people helping out now,
and lots more improvements for the developer guide planned,
as are more learning resources and interesting tasks for people.

The 'learn python by contributing' is a very interesting idea(to me), and I
guess we'll see how it goes.
Hopefully people learn something about python, C, or general software
development whilst they do it.


*The API cleanup*, and C API documentation that was done should make it
easier to understand the pygame code.
We can aggressively clean up things for pygame 2 as well.
For example, I have already worked on moving lots of files out of the root
of the repo and cleaned up 18 years of cruft.
There is more work to do here, like introducing cpplint for C code, and
pylint for python code.

There is now a link to the *compile page* improvements for the platform the
developer is using if the pygame source build fails.
This should help people compile it :) Which is the first step in
contributing things.

I'm going to start a *weekly online sprint again*.
And will try and ask people to contribute unit tests or at least ways to
reproduce issues when they submit them.
Engaging with people quickly often gets a response, and people are often
more happy to help out in solving their own problems.

The discord chat seems to have quite a few people