Together with all this people there were lots of interesting talks going on simultaneously and a lot of nice people to talk to. Because of this “details” we started coding whit only 6 hours left for the deadline

This GameJam with me were Andrews Medina and Luciano Pacheco, I met both from Python Brasil community (on PyConBrasil last year). We decided to develop a “Genius” clone for the XO, using it’s special “game-keys” and the “tablet position”. With only 6 hours to develop a game you can imagine that we were not even thinking about the graphics at all, but, suddenly a nice guy named came and offered himself to make pictures for our game. It happens that the guy was Valéssio Brito and he is an “Inkscape genius” (sorry… ), in less than one hour he made some cool graphics. That re-excited us and we went on with our code (less than one hour left for the deadline).

At 20h05, five minutes after the deadline, we finished the game, installed it in XO and send to the organization. It was very nice and as Pacheco said, it was one of the best experiences I could do in FISL for me

I must say that Andrews was shaking (like a “vara verde” as Luciano said) at the time we delivered our game…

From left to right: Valéssio, me (with the XO), Andrews and Pacheco

Thanks Pacheco, Andrews and Valéssio, it was very nice to participate

Thanks to the LEC/UFRGS people that organized the GameJam and thanks to the PyGame folks becuase they’ve developed this wonderful library

What is GSoC ?

You can read about GSoC in their website, but I will try to resume here what is GSoC.

Google pays you (a student) US$ 4500,00 for three months of work on a free/open source software.

First the organizations apply for GSoC as a mentoring organization. Each organization accepted by Google receive slots and distribute this slots in project ideas.

Then the student find a mentoring organization, choose a project (or propose a new one) and asks for a mentor (applying). The organization will choose the students and then monitor the student work. Note that a student can apply for 20 projects but if approved in more than one he will need to choose only one to work.

The student will receive from Google US$ 500,00 when the program starts, then US$ 2000,00 after a month of work and US$ 2000,00 when the program finishes. Obviously the mentor will check the student process/work and decide if he should receive the money or not.

When the student finishes the program, he receives a GSoC t-shirt and a Google certificate (nice! ).

Benefits

For students (like me):

• Contribute do free/open source software
• Learn and gain experience
• Get paid to code free/open source software
• A beautiful t-shirt
• think about your new job offers …

For organizations (like Python Software Foundation):

• More people involved in the development process
• People getting paid to develop needed features

I’m applying for BlueZ, the project idea is simple, build a high-level interface/layer upon python-dbus to provide the services/interfaces offered by BlueZ by D-Bus.

I’ll probably try to apply to OLPC as well.

I’m also applying (maybe too late) for Python Software Foundation to work on PyPy. The project idea is to support CPython 2.5 features and changes missing in PyPy.

For more information in GSoC I recommend watching this screencast by Titus Brown.

That’s all.

thanks to the OLPC the source code for the original SimCity game was released.

You can read about it here and download the source code.

The game has a new name, Micropolis, which was the working title at EA Games when the first SimCity was born. This is because of legal problems and to protect the name SimCity.

And thanks to OLPC, again, there is some Python code in it!

I went to GameJam Brasil at São Carlos this weekend with some friends from Senac (where i study CS). For those who don’t know what is the GameJam, i’ll try to explain, but you can read read more about it at http://wiki.laptop.org/wiki/GameJam.

The GameJam Brasil was based in the GameJam that occured in Boston. The main idea is to group developers and game designers in teams to produce games to the OLPC XO (more about the OLPC project at http://www.laptop.org). In São Carlos we had 32 hours (+/-) to develop the game.

Our team (CAS) members were me, Marcelo, Fabio and Adriano. We decided to develop some game with educational purpose, so Fabio gave us the idea of a Recycle game. You can see more about it at http://code.google.com/p/reciclapy.

After almost 40 hours of coding our game is “ready”, with a lot of bugs, of course The game is written in Python and PyGame (two technologies supported by the OLPC Project and that i like a lot).

You can see some pictures taken there in my flickr (with gamejambrasil tag).

I would like to thank everybody from UFSCar (LIA), Poli/USP (NATE) and USP São Carlos (and all the collaborators). They’ve made this event to be awesome (including the full time coffee-”break” hehehe). The collaborative spirit of the GameJam was very nice too. All the teams were helping each other all the time

It was very nice to participate!

[]‘s