[pygame] Pyzzle AGDC report

[andy@larrymite.com.au]

Thanks for fwding that email Pete.

Hello,
Im back from the oz road trip from hell.

This rant and some photos can be found here: http://pyzzle.sourceforge.net/agdc.html

Some additions to Da’s saturday rant:

Due to the Melodie Mars team having a music based game and hence a pretty
powerful music set up, Bunker-D's sound was pretty much drowned out. Unfort I
did not have time to get the sound levels right for head phone use. Since
myst/riven games and Bunker-D uses sound for mood, and other effects it was a
real shame no one got to hear it. 

We also had the problem of demonstration an game engine not an actual game. I
knew this would be a big problem but blah, who cares. Once most people in the
know were told they got it. But it did not help.

One cool thing was  that Pyzzle was the only program that could be quickly
hacked and updated. I did several updates over the day to improve parts
of the game that people were having problems with. No other team could do that
(:. Python rocks.

Straight after the conference we went to the Sony cocktail party. Da and Jo
drank as much free beer as they could, I was driving ): . Sony were giving out
temporary PS2 tattoos and PS2 condoms. Just what every geek wants. Thank you
Sony. (:

Saturday night we were unable to download any Pygame or python PS2 builds
because we just did not have any net access. Jos got ADSL but he had to spin
disks at a 21st and did not have time for downloading, my pc was left at the
conference and Da is internet challenged at the moment. Very frustrating. At the
21st we even thought about going over to near Swinbourne Uni. to download them.
But we are not quite geeky enough to do that (believe it or not). The result no
Pyzzle on PS2 ):

--------------------------
Sunday:
More demonstrating...

We crashed the Linux PS2 talk. That kit looks very cool. All I need now is a PS2
and that kit for some serious fun.

More demonstrating...

We went the start of the end key note speech and heard some very bad stories
about the pro game industry. We had to leave early to get on the oz road trip
from hell. I just got back.

-----------------------
Summing up:
Well worth going to very fun meet heaps of people and learned allot about pro.
game development. Im am so proud to be under the flag of open source/linux
because other then PS2-linux crew no one else was. 

Pyzzle and Bunker-D was not suited to be displayed at the conference at all. But
I glad we demonstrated an alternative to win32 closed source OpenGL/direct3D
game development. If we had more PCs we could have demonstrated just how
multi-platform Pyzzle + Pygame + Python + SDL is. That would have impressed
people. The conference also made we want to stick to this open-source
development for all future projects, it is by far the coolest way to develop
software and games. By the vibe of the conference pro game development is the
last area free software needs to make a large mark.

At the end of it all Pyzzle was not even in the finalists list. I will have to
find out why. Prob. engine not game thing. Congrats to Melodie Mars their game
was very good and they deserved it.

Some advice for anyone demonstrating at a similar event: Get your sound levels
right for head phones and have a very flash introduction or looping demo screen
to attract attention.

----------------------
What next:

Putting together bunker-D uncovered a few minor bugs in Pyzzle. Ill stick the
list on the site soon and get onto fixing them after bunker-D is online.

Ill clean up and package Bunker-D. It should be up in a few days. 

Have fun
Andy.



____________________________________
pygame mailing list
pygame-users@seul.org
http://pygame.seul.org