Looking Out To Sea

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote in this little box. My new job continues to form and my commute has been easier lately, since I’ve been getting a lift from a colleague who also lives in Edinburgh. I get back home in the evening much earlier, which is nice, though the start is still as early as ever (the alarm goes off at 5.30).

But I didn’t break this hiatus to talk about commuting, I promise. Last week was PyWeek, a twice-yearly programming challenge to write a computer game in the Python programming language. Nick was keen to give it a go, so between me, him and Mat we concocted an idea which was just interesting enough that it might be worth playing.

Due to some unforeseen problems we didn’t get much time to write code, so the game didn’t really come together in time for the deadline. I think, in fact, that the code was broken as zero-hour ticked over. Oh well.

Having started we decided to finish, so we all met on Monday night (for the first time since the challenge started…) and got large chunks of the game completed. It’s now playable, I think, though outrageously taxing and quite awkward for one person to play against themselves. The plan, then, is to iron out some of the kinks and see if we can pitch the difficulty at just the right level to make it addictive. Maybe we’ll get it transferred to an Android/iPhone app in the future?

I’ve known these guys for years but we’ve never actually sat down and written a program together for the fun of it. It was really interesting, especially since we were all basically learning Python from scratch for the purpose, and I was trying to remember what all this OO stuff is supposed to be about. Maybe we’ll tackle it again for the autumn PyWeek with a new game idea, more experience and maybe a bit more time scheduled to the task.