PyCon CA 2016 – The Art of Writing Wargames in Python with Kivy

Intro

Last year in November, I presented a talk about Kivy at PyCon Canada 2016. I talked about my experiences working with Kivy in the context of writing a strategy game. I discussed the various UI frameworks available to a Python developer, and why Kivy is currently the best choices for UIs in Python. Especially if you are interested in making a cross-platform app or game.

Video

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Abstract

Many of us got our start in programming, by building games and simple apps. However creating interesting games and UIs in Python was not a simple task especially for multiple platforms. Kivy, a cross-platform Python UI app framework changes all that. This talk discusses the journey of working with Kivy to develop a moderately complex strategy game. It also contrasts to using other platforms

Reaction

Overall, the talk went better than I expected. The audience was engaged and interested. There was a few technical difficulties, namely I had to resort to using my phone as a wifi hotspot to run my presentation rather than Ryerson University’s wifi. Also there was a noticeable delay between when I changed slides on my presentation notes, and the projected display. This kind of delay is probably the only downside of using slides.com this time around. Having a local copy would of worked better, which I will do so in the future.

Also I wish I had more time to come up with a better demo for the presentation. However even after the sprints, the hex grid layout still plagues my Kivy app. In hindsight, I probably should of worked on a simpler app. Also some folks were turned off by the use of wargames, rather general games. But you know, you learn from your mistakes.

Finally I got quite a few questions, and people are genuinely interested in checking out Kivy. Which ultimately was what I was trying to achieve with this talk.