How to make an icon

Today I spent a short time creating an icon for use in another project, but what I learned will probably also be applied to future pygauntlet icons. The first thing I did was find an image that I wanted to use as a basis for the icon from the web. I opened the image in the GIMP to scale and crop the image down to a square size (ideal for icons). Then I opened the square image in Inkscape to begin tracing it. I traced the lines in the original image that I wanted to use in my icon, then I copied those to a fresh Inkscape file to not have to deal with the original image. Once that is done, you can fill in the lines with colors, and save the file as a .svg, which is the default file type for saving from Inkscape. The final step uses a magic website called iConvert. Just upload the svg and then click the download buttons for the ico, icns and png files for windows, mac and linux icons.

Pyglet Recommendation

So today for a completely different project I decided to try out pyglet to see how much better or worse it would be for creating a .app or .exe package. Since I do my development on a mac, I'm mostly interested in the .app (although I will make a .exe when possible too). It turns out that the pyglet project is way easier to create a bundle with than the combination of pygame and pyopengl that I've been using on pygauntlet. If I had the time available to me to do a full or partial rewrite to pyglet I would, but pygauntlet depends so much on pygame that I don't see that being feasible. However, if anyone else is looking for a good library to use for rapid prototyping I am in full support of pyglet even after a single day. They even provide examples with setup.py scripts that do both py2app and py2exe.

Slow Going Packaging

So I spent a lot of time this evening trying to coerce py2app into packaging up pygauntlet into something I could distribute to people. It kept refusing for one problem or another so I'm calling it for now. It seems to be an issue with PyOpenGL at the moment, although it could just as easily be a problem with pygame. I believe the next step is going to be to try a fresh install of python by fully uninstalling all versions other than the one that came with my OS. If I do that I'll be sure to document which steps I take on the google code wiki so that at the very least, a set of instructions will exist that will allow people to run the game from the source even if it is a little more work than just double-clicking.

Score Display

As can be seen in this picture, the score display is now present in the game again, even when the OpenGL rendering is turned on. Also new to this picture are the walls and floors. Way better than what we used to have.