New Mac

Work have kindly given me a brand new MacBook Pro! It features the new 'Unibody Enclosure' and looks absolutely gorgeous - there's a video of it being made here.

Naturally, I spent some of last night making sure my Pygame efforts still worked on it. This pretty much forced me to try Python 2.6 + Pygame 1.9 (I had previously only tried Python 2.5 + Pygame 1.7) so I was quite pleased when it worked first time. Here's what it looks like:


This also hints at a couple of new features - coins + keys! Unfortunately, although you can now collect these items, you can't actually do anything with them yet.

Pixel Art

Something I am starting to realise is that pixel art is hard and animated pixel art is even harder. Not just hard, but extremely time consuming too. To give you an idea of how much work goes into these things, take a close look at the forward-facing frames for our protagonist ...

I'm telling you, the guys who did Metal Slug should get some kind of medal.

Pygame Update

I recently realised that I haven't blogged about my Python/Pygame efforts in quite a while, so I figured it was time for an update. The good news is, my lack of blogging is not reflected by a lack of development, so there's quite a few new features - so many, in fact, that it's probably best if I just post a video ...

So here we can see a couple of maps designed with my very own level editor, an animated main character, a scrolling background, the ability to seamlessly walk off one map and onto another, animated features (eg. flames), pickups (eg. coins) and movement correction (ie. note the way the little fella 'slides' off obstacles that are blocking his way).

If anyone's interested, I created this video by running gtk-recordMyDesktop against the Pygame window and converting the resulting .ogg with mencoder:

mencoder out.ogg -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts abitrate=160 -o rpg-world.avi

I have no idea what most of that means, but the quality has turned out okay!

Playing with Pygame

Over the past few weeks I've been writing a 'game' of sorts using Python and Pygame - it's still in the very early stages at present and is less of a game and more of a toy/proof of concept. Nonetheless, I'm fairly pleased with the results so far and since this is the first time I've tried doing any pixel art (or any computer art of any description) I think it looks okay ...


Obviously the player sprite is still a work in progress (although he does have a certain charm!)

For dev tools I'm using Eclipse + PyDev for coding and Gimp for the images.