I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and a great year (with that festive wish I shall excuse myself from not being able to deliver this post on time)! Going into 2019, let me share about the massive updates that took place till now. Let’s just jump into it!

News on Mid Evaluation (which happened just before Christmas): Every one of my mentees (who had listed me as their mentor in the student evaluation form) has passed because of their commendable spirit to (at least want to) contribute and learn new things.

Following are the updates since Week 1:

1. Search the Key

Summary of progress

We now have game sounds! The number of turns can be adjusted to change the difficulty for the user. Some bugs were fixed among other notable changes.

Contributors and their contributions

• @piba941 and @kartik1000 added some sounds to our game.
• @kaushik-ck helped fix some bugs and added a ‘Number of turns left’ counter which helps the player.
• @kshivamraj32 is our newest contributor from last time and helped with some bugs around the exit button on the game window.
• @harleyjoker1 deserves special appreciation for being a first timer in all aspects of contributing, and trying to work on the code and constantly sending changes. She’s also changed our README from before learning how to work on Git and GitHub.

The work rate has surely increased since Week 1 but can always improve!

2. Coin Fall game

Summary of progress

Things have massively changed, to such an extent that the game looks so much different than it used to, thanks to a visual overhaul. The mentees have done a lot of work on adding game modes and improving on them. Now there are six game modes:

• Classic (the original 30-second game mode),

• Hardcore (survival against a bomb rain),

• Heist (gather as many coins without missing 4 in a row),

• 1v1 (two players pitted against each other)

• Infinite (as long as you hit a bomb),

and (drumroll…)

• AI (test your own AI in the game)!

I’m most excited about having so many game modes and especially with the addition of AI, the game has indeed gone on another level, and I’m proud to have this project and be as much of a collaborator as a mentor.

Contributors and their contributions

• @amrit-choudhary has extensively helped in a lot of aspects. He brought in most of the visual changes and developments in the game modes. I must appreciate his efforts and especially give him credit to bring his own idea of having an AI in the game.

(AI in action!)

• @deepak2431 helped add background music and updated the README with the images that I’ve also shown on this post, to demonstrate how much the game has changed!

Once again, I’m happy with the work on this project. I still feel like something else is yet to come! I don’t want to fill this post with more images and gifs, so go ahead and check it out for yourself, it’ll be worth it!

3. Fetch Amul Topicals

Summary of contributions

The program has the feature to ask the user for a particular set of years instead of going through all of them.

Contributors and their contributions

• @tmsreekanth98 is one of our newest contributors who solved the major issue as mentioned above. He’s been patient with me whenever I asked him to fix minute things around this issue.
• Thanks to @shubham7298, our code now runs on both Python2 and Python3. He provided a workaround with the urllib.urlretrieve module which has been changed in Python3. urllib has been split up into different parts on the basis of utility in Python3 from Python2; urlretrieve is now part of urllib.request.
• @atul-saswat is a relatively new contributor who’s tried his hand at helping with this project. He made our code PEP8 compliant and tried modifying the README.

At this point, I’m very happy to see that the major issues surrounding the scraper itself have been solved! My long-term goal still remains, to make a web app to display the topicals in an easy to navigate format.

Happy new year to you all! Let me end it here with a very generic wish to have a good year ahead.

The program is ending in about a week or so, and I’m happy with the overall progress of my projects and my mentees. I’ve learnt a lot myself too. I hope I’ve inspired a few to continue learning and contributing, because that’s the overall goal that I am working for, and that is the objective of programmes like these.

More on my projects next week!