Spielend programmieren lernen

It's finally time for an short update. I got a bunch of very interesting links from my friend Stefan Mijucic and while i have not really yet managed to dive deeply into them i will just list them here with a short description:

• https://github.com/fogleman/Minecraft

A working Minecraft-Demo, written in python3 and pyglet, using less than 1000 lines of code! It's not a clone of the complete Minecraft game of course, but a solid demo with random-generated landscape and the ability move around and to dig and to build 4 different kind of cubes.

If you want to test it yourself, here are my instructions using Ubuntu Linux:

1. Download the zip from Github
2. Extract the zipfile it into an empty folder (like '~/test' )
3. Open a terminal inside this folder (CTRL+ALT+t)
4. type:

cd Minecraft-master
sudo pip3 install pyglet
python3 main.py

My experiences using Minecraft-like games for code teaching in my computer courses for children are rather mixed, but maybe this project will motivate me to give it another try. Perfect example of the power of python and pyglet!

If have very fond memories of the cool computer games of the 1980 and 1990 era, and i remember browsing sites like Home of the underdogs and Wine to see if i can get my old favorites running on modern hardware. However running original old games includes all those old bugs and hardware as well as design limitations. Re-making the old games from scratch, as free/libre open source software promises a time-travel back into the good old days of computer gaming without those drawbacks. I have not yet found my future pet project among this list but i'm sure i fill find it:

• https://osgameclones.com/

The list can be edited via Github-Pull requests

screenshot of Descent. Source: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32599342

This nice list collects “open-sourced” commercial source code, like of the Infocom Text adventures. I stumbled over an interview with an develope in the readme of the page of the first Descent game and found this highly entertaining and insightful gem of wisdom:

Mike: The main reason is we figured a lot of people aspiring to work in the game industry would like to see production “quality” code. There are two reasons for this. One, you can learn a lot by looking at working code. Two, people will see that you can write a decent game without writing beautiful code.
Matt: That's a good thing?
Mike: Not really, except that it might make people think writing production quality code isn't that hard.
Matt: That's a good thing?
Mike: Well, not really, unless they learn that they have to focus on designing a brilliant game, rather than writing brilliant code.
Matt: Ah, that's a good thing.
Mike: Yeah, I don't think I understood that until we started working on Descent. At first all I cared about was writing technically good code.
Matt: Then we ran out of money and all we cared about was finishing our game.
Mike: Right. Our code got ugly, but our game got done.