A big thanks for all the people who run and rated my game, especially those on non-windows systems that Panda3D dislikes. It's a bit funny (and sad) as procrastimancer and I, who both used Panda3D got 12 scores and 36% DNW

Anyway I'm happy with what I've done in a weeks time, even if most people didn't find my game much fun. I'd say it was more fun (for me) then my entry last time and I'll call that a successes.

The innovations as far as gameplay or genre are almost non-existent, it's a beat'em-up game. The only thing is the way the time-pressure works in my game. There is no timer or countdown but the time of the day and lighting changes - it's not that apparent on the default difficulty setting but on 'hard' the level is longer, there are more monsters and they are much tougher - it's hard to get to the fire before nightfall and at night without a fire it is next to impossible to spot and avoid traps... but if someone only played on the 'normal' setting and not long, one might miss that lighting changes at all.

The innovations where on the technical side. It is a modern 3D game that mimics a old 2D games that in turn tried to mimic 3D. The level is also random, or random-ish, composed each time from 7 (or more) out of 11 available tiles.

I feel that the innovation score was lowered because my game had more then 8-bits. For those I can only say - set the color count to 5 and pixel size to 4, if that's still not 8-bit enough you're masochistic.

The easter eggs.

On one of the tiles there's a crashed spaceship from my last entry:

There's also a 'monolith' like in 'Space Odyssey' (it's hard to tell) and Stonehenge.

In the readme I mentioned a 'nude-patch' configuration option... and it actually works if someone was bold enough to set it to '1'. But I'm not gonna post screenshots of that ;)

Thanks for your feedback! I was happy to see a few other entries I really liked get high scores.

I was worried some of the effort I put in would be overlooked, but people seemed to appreciate it, and that's pretty gratifying. I spent quite a bit of time tweaking the controls and handling, and I think it makes a big difference in a game like this. I also made a few gameplay choices so that instructions would be minimized and you could jump right in without a menu screen.

I wasn't able to squeeze quite as much performance out of pygame as I would have liked, but I think it would be possible with more time, and I'm still pretty happy with pygame overall. I'm glad I put in a lowres option so that it was at least playable (if choppy) on slow systems.

I don't plan to keep working on this or make an executable version or anything, but maybe someday I'll port it to JavaScript. See you next time!

I realize this comes way late but going through the game again I realize how ridiculously impossible it is to get to the end. Funny I managed it a few times on the last Saturday, sleep deprived and all.

The file is also about half the size of the original.

ShadowWorld-v3.zip

I always try to do the post-mortem ASAP so it doesn't get cold, even if the emotions still run high and that could influence my writing. I couldn't do it this time as I finished the game too exhausted to keep thinking on it.

As the days went by I felt less and less keen to write it, so this post-mortem is going to be shorter than usual.

What went right

The idea for "Grid Runners" came from a previous PyWeek (16?). At that time the theme was not what was I was hoping and I didn't use it. I thought that the idea had potential but I never implemented it as a non-pyweek game. The 8-bit theme is not very inspiring, but it is quite open and it's not impossible to adapt your idea so it fits.

More or less I implemented what I had planned, so that was something that definitely went right.

I'm getting very effective with the tools I use: Gimp, Tiled, Audacity, Schism Tracker (new this PyWeek, replaced the old SoundTracker in my tool-set) and Pyglet (more about this one in what went wrong).

My workflow regarding animations in Gimp is not the best (anything but the most basic animations are difficult to test and adjust). Getting the grid runners' animation right was slow, although it turned out quite nice at the end.

I spent a lot of time polishing the game even before it was a game, and I think it was a good idea. In PyWeek 17 I left the music and audio to the last minute and it affected the final result. This time I tried to allocate time to work on every aspect of the game, although I didn't succeeded completely because I couldn't start with the level design until Saturday afternoon. Close enough!

What went wrong

I got stuck a couple of times with Pyglet/OpenGL related stuff. For example I used a shader for the first time and that was a bad idea because I wasted a lot of time getting it right (although it looks great at the end!). Also I had a lot of problems to get the viewport right so the graphics were scaled properly to get a nice pixel-art effect. I knew how to do it but I was getting artifacts and pixel-bleeding and after all the efforts that didn't feel right; I narrowed down the problem to some sort of issue related to the viewport being multiple of 2 or the tile size, so I found a workaround that seems to work making the game look nice both in a window and in full screen.

Besides that I had a couple of W-T-F issues related to the fact that I'm a OpenGL-newbie, but I managed to carry on with a workaround or changing the implementation of that feature. In fact the game has a couple of glitches because last minute fixes (they don't affect the gameplay at all, so it's OK).

I made a mistake not planing the AI of the enemies during the week because I had never done it before and when I started working on it on Saturday I was already tired and it doesn't help that you know that you shouldn't invest more than a couple of hours or you won't have time to do the levels. The end result works, but it can be improved (and I did it in a post-compo version).

Finally I think the game was a little bit too ambitious for a week, and it was definitely too risky doing the levels Saturday afternoon when I was quite tired. I love Tiled and it's a wonderful tool but when I finished the last level I swear I don't want to have to deal with its interface in some time.

Summing up

I'm quite proud of the end result: the music, the graphics and the gameplay. It was hard work but totally worth it!

Hi

unfortunately another bug has been reported. It is corrected very simple:

gamelib/context.py line 296 should be:

if spr == self.sprite and self.sprite is not None and hasattr(self.sprite, "on_click"):

If you want to get the corrected source you can get it here:

https://bitbucket.org/dr0id/pyweek-games/src/6dd2036861a90fc647842a40e80bfb45fe7231dd/pyweek18-2014-05/?at=default

Hi

unfortunately there is a small bug:

Line 223 in dialogs.py should be:

sound.songs['infados'].play()


Sorry for that inconvenience.

If you want to skip the levels press F8 n times and then F9 (look the level index up in context.py on line 946)

I've finally managed to construct a Mac OS X package that works on machines that aren't mine: robolock-II-0.1.dmg

This is identical code to our final entries. Only the packaging has changed.

For the curious (especially me-in-the-future), I ended up with the following process after much trial and error:

1. Install a 32-bit (not 64-bit) Python from python.org -- I used this one.
2. Install a suitable pre-built pygame package from pygame.org -- I used this one.
3. Create a virtualenv using the aforementioned Python and pass --system-site-packages so that the aforementioned pygame is available.
4. Install game depencies in this virtualenv, install py2app, run python setup.py py2app or whatever.

We were really happy with our game this PyWeek so this evening I made a trailer, which is a first for me.

It's on the Internet and everything! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfb1bli2i98

Im sharing this updated version, post pyweek. There are no gameplay changes. Instead the game starts at the main menu which I had disabled for debugging and a few lines of story.

ShadowWorld-v2.zip

As promised, here is a short screencast of the Ookoobah gameplay: http://youtu.be/aiXntST983E.