Pycon 2016 Sprint

From June 2-4, we kicked off Game Camp with our inaugural sprint event.

Goals of the Sprint

The main goals for this sprint are to explore and record the process of making games with Python and Kivy, and then use these experiences to create fun, effective, and informative tutorials for others who want to get started writing their own games!

• Explore; i.e. developing a game: We'd like you to all try your hand at making a game! Make mistakes, be messy and learn by doing!
• Record; i.e. documenting the process: This is as important (and arguably more important) than the code itself when developing tutorials. We want you to record your designs, your decisions, the problems you are encountering, and the solutions you came up with. These are the elements that make tutorials great.

To this end, we are encouraging people to work in groups of two (or even three), and that you take turns developing and documenting.

Step 0

• Get on slack! Go to https://pyconsprints.herokuapp.com/ to get an account, and then join the #gamecamp channel on https://pyconsprints.slack.com.

Step 1

Set up your development environment

• Set up your development environment. See our Getting Started guide.
• Create your github repo and add its name to the Pycon 2016 Project List
• Check out the Game Camp Wiki Pages

Step 2

For this sprint, we are going to work in groups of 2 (or 3).

• Find a partner
• If you need help, talk to Kjell or Amy!

Step 3

• Come up with a game idea (or pick from the Pycon 2016 Project List),
  or
• pick a tutorial to follow.
• Create a github repo to hold your work. You can started quickly by forking the gamecamp repo, which contains the template files you need
• If you are using your own github repo, please make sure it has a valid LICENSE file, so we can incorporate your work into the project! (For Game Camp contributions, please use MIT for code, and CC-BY for assets and text content)

Step 4

Learn the Kivy basics: We suggest reviewing:

• kv (kvlang) files,
• Kivy Properties and Events
• Layouts and play around with layouts interactively:

cd YOUR_KIVY_CHECKOUT/examples/demo/kivycatalog
python main.py

If there's a demand, we may choose to run some impromptu training sessions.

Step 5

• Make your game! It's best if you and your partners take turns programming and documenting (or if you prefer, storytelling), switching between roles whenever you take a break. Bonus points to documenting the process in a jupyter notebook using magics and screenshots (see the example notebook in the repo. If you don't have jupyter notebooks installed in your kivy env yet, you'll want to conda install jupyter notebook.
• Do this in your own fork of the project or github repo and then we'll figure out how we want to pull it in at the end of the day. See Git Recipes for more on how to us git/github for this project.
• We suggest you take a break (and commit your code!) every 25 minutes.

Step 6

• Please give your feedback when you are done. This is the easiest way that you can help us make these events better.