zombie | Insanely fast , full-stack , headless browser | Runtime Evironment library

The tech-lead is wrong: your code is perfectly efficient the way it is written. Making the code shorter does not make it faster or more "elegant".

However, shorter code can be easier to maintain and change. Your code is fine as long as the number of heart containers is always exactly 12. But if you want to change that (to increase/decrease the difficultly of the game, or let the player get new heart containers) then this code won't work. It is hard-coded to work with exactly 12 heart containers only.

To change this, put this repetitive code in a loop. You'll need to look at the pattern of how the numbers change and create a small math formula for it. I've come up with the following. (I've also added constants instead of the integer literals, so that the code is easier to read and change.)

Here's an adaptation of your first program. It uses the default SIGCHLD signal handling, which means that the signals are not delivered (by the kernel) to the parent process when a child dies (forkwait29.c):

...Once everything is cleared up, it keeps restarting -> failing -> starting, etc. in a loop every second.

When your first command returns no pod, the trailing commands (eg. awk, xargs) fails and returns non-zero exit code. Such exit code is perceived by the controller that the job has failed and therefore start a new pod to re-run the job. You should just exit with zero when there is no pod returned.

Here's the version that I am using for many years. This function is set as the Sys.sigchld handler with Sys.set_signal Sys.sigchld (Sys.Signal_handle reap).

Use pygame.time.get_ticks() to measure time. This function measures the time since the game started in milliseconds. Once a collision is detected, calculate the time the zombie will take the next treasure:

Turns out this is a recently-introduced bug in the threading implementation. Thread.join calls the internal method Thread._wait_for_tstate_lock, and that method was recently changed to look like this:

You can do it like this:

pygame.Surface.get_rect.get_rect() returns a rectangle with the size of the Surface object, that always starts at (0, 0) since a Surface object has no position. A Surface is blit at a position on the screen.
Therefore all the rectangles have the same position (0, 0) and the collision test evaluates True for all objects. You have to update the position of the rectangle before the collision test:

See How do I rotate an image around its center using PyGame?. The trick is to get the center of the image before rotation and set it after rotation. Also, you need to rotate the original image to avoid distortion: