Mancala prototype

This has been a lot of fun. It was nice having a push to get started.

Wow! Things have finally started coming together with the map. All the chits fall into place and there is pathfinding and it runs out of pieces gracefully. I’m very happy with the momentum it has even if nothing to do with characters or the rest of the layout are started.

A fine start to retirement.

Found a bug in the scroll/zoom/camera library I was using. Spent a lot of time before realizing that no really, my code wasn’t the problem. Submitted a fix. Maybe something happens. Meanwhile I’m getting distracted by all the future things I might need for mapping. I’m so glad I got the actual mancala part of this project done early!

370 individually aligned sprites all neatly described in a couple of config files later and I really should move to the actual map part. At least it looks pretty.

Splitting map counters out of a pdf is so tedious. The scan is close to aligned… but some of the map pieces are not quite correct in the original. Half way done. Soon I will have to actually do the map thing instead of getting distracted by art.

Spent a few hours looking at other frameworks. And realizing that I don’t want to learn a new IDE to have decent completions when using javascript/typescript.

If I commit to only writing solitaire games pygame might be plenty good enough. This feels like a terrible way to limit myself.

It is a playable game now.

I need to fix the art. Who would have ever thought that green frogs on green lily pads might be hard to see?

Some simple sounds for feedback on what is happening (invalid clicks, bonus turn etc) would help.

And of course my python is dreadful. But the game does look pretty reasonable.

Maybe I start a second framework a week early.

Started with some basic pygame over the weekend. And settled on a theme. Frogs jumping between lily pads instead of stones in pits. Basic board is there but no frogs yet.

pygame looks like it is probably going to be a lot of work for future games if I want all the nice ui/layout toys web dev gets cheap. Maybe pygame-menu fixes some of that? Two player examples are thin too. That is what week three’s restart goal covers!