I’m at that point in my Python learning journey where I’m getting really bored with doing courses, which start to feel like un-paid work in a lot of ways. When the class tells you to build a program that does X and you find X as interesting as watching paint dry, that’s disturbingly close to what I do for a living all day, but at least there I get paid.
However I’m not anywhere near the level of competency to dive into doing the things I want to learn Python for: AI stuff, like maybe Custom Nodes for Comfy UI or just basic user interfaces for whatever new open source LLM model is hot that week.
I was thinking about what kind of newbie-friendly thing I could build that would be interesting to me, and my mind flew back to my first years of using a computer and what we’d spend all day on: games. In particular, games written in BASIC. There I’d be on my Atari 400 with its chicklet keyboard bruising my fingertips typing in code from some magazine. Then (after storing the program on a cassette tape!) I’d play the game a bit and soon after start modifying it since doing so was so easy. I learned a lot that way.
Rebuilding Retro BASIC Games in Python
Then inspiration struck! I could do the same with Python. And to keep it totally old school I found 101 BASIC Computer Games on Archive.org. This not the 101 Computer Games book I had back in the day but it’s the same idea. (The one I had is listed at Amazon for $272!!) Of course I’m not typing in the code, I’m just replicating it in Python, and ideally making the games better. Most of these games were written by high school students back in the 1970s.
So for example the first game: Acey Du, is a simpler variant of Acey Deucy which is a simple game where you are dealt 2 cards and have to guess if the next card will fall between the two. In the book’s version the ‘cards’ are just random numbers, not an exhaustible deck of cards, making it purely a guessing game. So I added a proper deck of cards meaning if you can remember what cards have been used you can make better guesses.
This version had a betting system which I thought could act as a score. How much can you accumulate before the deck is exhausted? But then I thought “If I place a bet when the dealt cards are 2 and K it should pay less than if I place a bet when the cards are 5 and 9” so I’m going to change the odds based on the range of numbers between the two cards.
And maybe I’ll add a high score table that’s written to a file and so persistent.
And if I’m not bored by then, perhaps I’ll add a UI to it. Originally I was writing these just like BASIC programs: just a CLI and text feedback.
So yeah, that’s my plan for now. Take an old BASIC game, get it working in Python, then make it better. Then throw it away and start on a new game.
My next challenge will be figuring out how to turn off all the AI assistance I have in my IDE because the danged AI is always suggesting complete chunks of code that work well, before I’ve even had a moment to think about how I would accomplish the task at hand. Though, I dunno, in real world situations I’d have that all on and would welcome the suggestions so I’m still on the fence about that. Guess I could set aside VS Code and type up the programs in Sublime or even Notepad!
