SKELY

This project attempts to create a simple game called "SKELY" using "Pyxel," a niche game engine for developing retro games in Python, while adding an ERC20 token contract to disperse tokens based on the amount of coins acquired in-game. The game is an easy platformer, where you have to collect the coins to win. Due to time constraints, I was only able to hack together one tiny level that can be completed in 5 seconds! After the hackathon, I'm likely to try to make the game enjoyable, I promise!

My goal for this project was to develop the simplest of prototypes, as I'm a coding noob, to learn more Python, Vyper, gamedev and smart contract skills. Ultimately, I'd like to become good enough to participate with others in an IRL hackathon in the future!

I had so many stretch goals for this project that I just couldn't get to, such as:

• making the game much more fun & engaging
• timer & database integration for leaderboards
• Zk integration, perhaps with Railgun or ZkSync
• wallet sign-in / connect
• NFT trophies
• more intuitive coin dispersal, including a more complex way of issuing tokens

Again, my goal was to just create the simplest of prototypes to learn, so for that, I'm good with where I'm at! I created the art, animation, music, sounds, and lots of the code myself. However, the code is definitely built on the backs of legends, for which I'm thankful.

This project uses Vyper, Python, and a little JS for the front-end. I enjoyed learning and using tools and frameworks such as uv, moccasin, snekmate, metamask, and others to assist in the coding process. Of course, I also had ChatGPT 5 to help guide the way, though I tried my best to do things on my own and learn from doing.

I used Aseprite to create the artwork in-game. The music and sounds were created using the built-in editor in Pyxel, which you load from terminal. It was cool to figure out how to get everything from the Pyxel resource file into my skely.py to create the game.

For Vyper and Python, I watched and coded along with Patrick Collins from Cyfrin Updraft, and I'm almost complete with Intermediate Python and Vyper course. Tremendous resource! I learned a lot about coding best practices, but ran out of time to develop more on my own. I had a lot of hand-holding and using example projects.

I'm split with using AI for learning. I like trying to figure things out on my own, but I'd likely be banging my head against the wall for 2 weeks straight just trying to get a contract to compile. Obviously, I'm looking at examples, but I'm a big fan of repetition as well. ChatGPT has been tremendous with explaining concepts and code to me, as well as generating things that would be levels above where I'm currently at in my learning journey. However, I'm take the time to review the code, type it in, and ask questions about it. Hopefully, it will all seek in as I continue to work on projects, ask questions, and solve them with all the tools at my disposal. I am taking notes and learning a ton through this hackathon!

I had to use AI to help with the front-end stuff, I haven't learned much JS or Solidity but I could follow along with what was happening.