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- To: pete@shinners.org
- Subject: Pyzzle at the AGDC exhibition
- From: Damon Smith <damon@larrymite.com.au>
- Date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 22:36:40 +1100 (AEDT)
- Delivery-date: Sat, 07 Dec 2002 06:38:16 -0500
- Envelope-to: pete@shinners.org
- User-agent: IMP/PHP IMAP webmail program 2.2.8
Hi Pete,
Andy Jones (of the Pyzzle project) asked me to send you this, as I am not on
the Pygame list, and he wanted to post some info on how we went at the
conference today. Could you possibly send the following to the Pygame list?
Hi all,
I've got a fairly hefty bit of info on Team Pyzzle's excursion to the
Australian Game Developers Conference today. As you may know, the AGDC are
holding a competition this year for the best unsigned game, and Andy Jones
entered Pyzzle into it. We got shortlisted, so we got to go in there and
display the game on a tabletop at the conference itself. Unfortunately, we
only had a week or so of notice, so we've been madly trying to get a demo game
happening to demonstrate. We've got something to show, it's a small scenario
called Bunker D, and it basically has some rooms and a single (pretty hard)
puzzle. I'm sure Andy will be putting a version of it up on the
pyzzle.sourceforge website as soon as we can get it's size down a bit from it's
current 100 MB status (we haven't compressed anything, and it's grossly space
inefficient.)
There are 6 other parties that have unsigned games on the shortlist for the
competition, and we are all set up on a set of tabletops just inside the door
of the conference exhibition area. All the other mobs seem like good value,
and thy've done some great stuff, but their games are basically all openGL 3D
projects for windows, so we're proudly flying the flag for the open source and
linux communities.
A lot of the student types coming through ignored our somewhat cerebral entry
into the comp, because of it's lack of flashy openGL, but we did get a fair bit
of interest, and we all got to wax evangelistic about linux, python, pygame and
open source to impressionable and enthusiastic teenagers (and some older
types). One guy did actually solve the puzzle too (although I sorta nudged him
in the right direction). We got a good interview with the GameSpy writer in
The Age here in Melbourne too, so I'm hoping we rate a mention on Thursday in
the green guide (I think that's where it is.. maybe it's in the IT section)
The rest of the expo is fairly interesting, the highlight for us being the PS2
mob; Sony has set up a playstation 2 stand with a few developers from the
performance testing section, and they've brought the Playstation 2 developer
unit, and a couple of playstation 2 linux kits. They're great and really
friendly and they even let us hook up a laptop and try to get Pyzzle working on
one of their playstation linux units. The PS2-linux units had SDL and Python
on them already, so we thought perhaps we'd see if pygame would compile and we
could run our Pyzzle scenario on the kick-arse 100 cm plasma screens on the PS2-
linux units. The other teams would be green with envy. They only had Python
1.5~ though, so I'm collecting the PS2 ports of Pygame and Python so we can
install it tomorrow. If it works it will rock. The other guys will be spewing.
So if any of you out there are floating around the MCC tomorrow, we'll be back
in around 9 am until 2 pm, I don't think it costs anything to get into the
exhibition part of it, and you can meet me, Andy Jones and Jo Fleming all hyped
up on caffeine lolly water, trying to get Pyzzle and Bunker D up on a PS2-linux
box. I'm going to be awfully proud if my renders come up on that plasma
display. All in all Sony have put on a good show for us, with the linux boxes,
the friendly guru PS2 developers from around the world, and a nice after show
drinks with PS2 giveaways.
Damon.
P.S. Andy had to leave his PC at the show overnight, so that's why I'm writing
this little rant.
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