What was the project that made you feel skilled in Python?

[Ben Finney]

Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> writes:

> Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> > This resulted in a library for rolling dice in different
> > combinations, and looking up result tables
> > <URL:https://pypi.python.org/pypi/alea>.
>
> Fun fun! Of course, when I hear "rolling dice in different
> combinations", my mind immediately turns to Dungeons and Dragons,
> where it's plausible to roll d20+7, then roll 2d8+d6+12 to figure out
> how much damage you did...

Yeah, and lots of board games use custom dice with faces specific to
that game (symbols, non-consecutive numbers, etc.), so the Die class
allows the faces to be any object the application needs.

> But the hard part of board games is usually the board.

A lot of the board games I'm intrigued by don't have much of a board;
they use custom cards and tokens and (maybe) dice, and the “board” is an
abstraction of where all the pieces are on the table.

> I used to spend ages trying to draw up a half-decent board, and ended
> up giving up. By "simulate", I'm guessing you mean that you didn't
> actually draw anything of the sort?

Right. The (never completed) application was to simulate the mechanics
of that particular game so I could see how it would play out, not be an
interactive playable game.

I've long been aware there is an enormous amount of UI-programming work
involved with interactive playable games. My ambition for that work was
quenched from attempting it in my teenage years :-)

-- 
 \        “With Lisp or Forth, a master programmer has unlimited power |
  `\     and expressiveness. With Python, even a regular guy can reach |
_o__)                               for the stars.” —Raymond Hettinger |
Ben Finney