Zovirl Industries

Mark Ivey’s weblog

Django on App Engine

Some of the folks at Google have released a sweet Google App Engine Helper for Django. It consists of a skeleton Django project with all the little tweaks necessary to run on top of App Engine, and it makes it really easy to get started.

I used the helper to start a simple Django app that shows tiled maps, using the images I previously created. Making a map generator is way, way down on the list of things that might possibly make this game fun, so I just quickly made three 10×10 islands manually. Here’s the code which generates the island in the screenshot:

island1 = _Expand("""O O L L O O L L L O
O L C_road_s L L L L F L O
O L L_road_en L_road_ew L_road_ew F_road_esw C_road_w F O O
O L L L L F_road_ns F L L O
O O O L L L_road_ns L L L O
O L L L M L_road_ns L L L L
L L L L L L_road_ns M L L L
L L L M M L_road_ns L L L O
O L L L L L_road_en C_road_w O L O
O O O L L L L O O L""")

The app picks one of the three islands randomly and spits out an HTML table containing the image tiles. A little bit of CSS makes it fit together without borders/gaps:

table {
  border-collapse: collapse;
}

td, tr {
  line-height: 0;
  padding: 0;
}

.island {
  border: solid 1px black;
  float: left;
  margin: 1em;
}

If you want to see it live, the latest version is running here.