Mission is a Failure

I am 10 chapters into a book on how to code a space adventure game in Python. Normally I like to roll my own code to implement ideas from books. This started out okay. However the infrastructure for this game is very hard to work with. For example, there is an array which represents a grid of rooms. But this is only a single dimensional array. Plus there is a secret item at location 0 that is not part of the grid. It is a pain to easily, say, do something to the rooms on the right side of the grid.

There are also a lot of other weird things going on in the sample code. Lot of magic numbers that correspond to either room numbers or codes for certain types of tiles to display. And there are lists of tuples where you need to know what field is in each position of the tuple. I have just about given up trying to follow the code that is presented.

I also thought I would be learning some Pygame Zero modules details. Nope. Not yet at least. I am trying to gain some wisdom on the algorithms and techniques used for the game development here. There are a few items of worth such as animating movement or controlling shadows. Can't wait to finish this book so I can begin rolling my own adventure. And I presume I will just use straight Pygame to do the graphics.

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