Thank you so much for your support and comments!

I'm so sorry for the ones that didn't work... I really should test on Mac and Linux for the next Pyweek.

From the comments I saw three major problem:

• The game is not working because certain module or file is not found
  
• The story that was told is not clear
• There weren't much gameplay

The first issue has two possible causes. My texture loading module was glitchy and it reports a texture loading error, or noisepy was not install and it returns a module not installed error. I recently fixed the texture module and it should be working correctly, and I simply forgot to include noisepy when I was using py2exe D:.

For the second issue, here is the answer: this game emphasized my first year in university, which is basically me at the moment :D. And how did I emphasized that in the game? here goes:

• The controllable character is headless, there were a couple of achievements related to "losing direction".
• The first scene is basically, you were forced to type unwanted things to continue -> my TAs were like that, yep.
• When you've waited too long in one scene, the narrator gets mad and the box becomes unstable -> deadlines basically.
• In the shooting stars part you make choices, it starts off obvious but it soon got harder, and you have to decide on your intuitions
• At this point of life I realized the actual value of time. In the third stage, with the choices you've made to either skip or wait determines your attitude with time. However, this became completely ionic because you are actually wasting time waiting in reality. And for the little "aren't you a smart boy" reaction after you've chosen to skip, the reason is that.... usually the people who think they are smart tend to waste a lot of their time.
• Walking in the forest part is basically the entertainment and socializing. The true meaning behind the question "do you flow with it?", is asking whether or not you have the urge to socialize and do everything together with other people. I actually felt quite lonely during the first month of university, and if I could paint how that period of time felt like, a lone man in the forest, a current which doesn't carry you, he walks around in circles, and touching the flags that were 'unreachable'(relate to the 'unclickable' achievement). The final achievement in the forest scene is 'take a walk', it firstly relates to the 'Take a Walk' song by Passion Pit, and it also relates to how it managed to meet friends later on :D.
  
• The result paper looked like the diploma paper, that's actually the intention behind it.
  
• The background music is played by guitar -> I've just started learning guitar in September!
• Furthermore, there were some meaning or some story of mine behind each achievement! But that's too much to write here.
• DMG is a acronym me and my friends made up for Doris McCarthy Gallery... and I just decided to put it there :P
  

The third issue, no gameplay... Sorry, I was so into composing my stories in there that I basically had no time left for gameplay D; . I will add more gameplay in my next Pyweek entry.

Again, thank you so much for your feedbacks!

I'm now going to try to respond to all of the individual comments I got, mostly just for self reference on what I did really well on and what I could improve.

larry

You control traffic lights at intersections by clicking on them with your mouse and toggling them from red to green. Clear crashes by right-clicking on crashed cars. That's the game! The game ran great, and it was clear from moment to moment what was going on. Not exactly my kind of game; it ultimately kind of devolves into a game of simply having quick & accurate mouse movement.

Tip for getting the game to run on Linux, and maybe Mac too: go into the "sfx" directory and copy all the uppercase sound effect files to their lowercase equivalents. For example, copy "Horn.wav" to "horn.wav".

I agree that you had to have very precise and fast mouse movement, at least for some of the harder levels. I did get a couple of comments about the "Horn.wav" problem for Linux. Linux was the one platform I did not test my game on (Probably should have, because that's what most of you are using). One easy way I could do that is by checking all the caps and non-caps on file names. Thank you for the feedback.

Tee

It's visible the amount of work you put into this; it looks very complete. I appreciate all the different modes and levels and that's not easy to pull off in one week. I admit that this style of gameplay (multitasking-type games) doesn't appeal to me in particular too much, but I enjoyed it nevertheless. It's nicely executed and well polished overall.

I agree with the statement that making levels and different modes is not easy to pull off in a week, but not for this game. For the past two Pyweeks I competed in I did have a lot of trouble with this as you had so many objects that make up one level, and you have to design the level very well. For Road Rage there were not as many objects in one level, all you really needed to figure out is how many makes the balance between not too easy and not too hard to make the level go smooth. The only thing that really took time was testing the levels to see if they were too hard or too easy and then constantly adjusting them to get them to an equilibrium. Thanks for the positive feedback. :)

Cosmologicon

I feel like I've played pretty similar games before, but this is very well done. Good job making a lot of different levels with a good progression of difficulty out of just a couple simple mechanics. The half-controlled intersections - in particular Level 8 - felt just a bit unfair whenever I had to decide whether to let a bus through with no way of knowing whether it would make it in time. (Some sort of indicator at each edge of how long until the next car appeared is one possible fix.) But for the most part, I liked the challenges.

Half-Controlled intersections were really supposed to make you make decisions on wether you wanted to risk a crash or make people mad. The decisions probably varied from Level to Level (like when you went from trying to avoid crashes to trying to avoid angry drivers). I agree that these were very challenging and a little unfair, which is why I tried to put them only on harder levels. I like your idea of putting indicators on the edge specifying when the next car would come, and I'll probably do that in a Post-Mortem. Thank you for the feedback!

DR0ID

nice game, 3 game modes (I haven't tried them all)

Thanks for the positive feedback!

yarolig

Well made!

Road crossings without lights are disaster.

That's what they were supposed to be, >:). Thanks for the positive feedback.

cauch

Nice game.

I'm not sure the system to punish letting on way being always red is well balanced or even work: in survival, the time still increases for ages.

Also, when one line is without control and a bus is coming on a perpendicular line, I have the feeling the chance of success are just random: it depends if you are lucky and no new car appears on the line without control, as they go faster than the bus.

The car/bus can also appear and disappear outside of the screen, so they just not pop out of thin air.

I had fun playing around and I appreciated the existence of a menu, of options and of different levels and different mode.

About the system on punishing for keeping to many people on red, that was just a very bad attempt at an anti-cheat system. I didn't want people to cheat through the game by leaving every light on red, leaving the game on for a long period of time, and then come back and win every level. I agree with your point that system was unfairly balanced and I probably should've messed with it from level to make it more fair.

Another comment about the half-controlled intersections, success doesn't really depend on if cars and buses go, you kind of just had to make a decision on wether a line of cars would make it in time or if you needed them to stay put. Thanks for the feedback!

saluk

Great job! I rage quit around level 8 or 9 because I got irritated with the hitboxes on the cars. I feel like once they are half or more across the opposing light they should continue even if you change the light to red. But they are stopping even if they are a little PAST the light. Numerous cases of having a crash because the last car in a line stopped moving when I felt like changing the light was the right move got very frustrating.

The cars stopping past the light was a "feature" if you know what I mean. I understand that stuff like that doesn't happen in real life and it keeps going, but the way I had the system for Traffic Lights set up that didn't happen. I only kept it in because I felt like if cars kept going then there would be less possibility of having a crash and I didn't really want to make it too easy. Thanks for the feedback.

mit-mit

Game was pretty fun: very similar to another entry this comp. I think this game did a bit better job than the other in the more steady progression of levels, and the use of the time limit and other objectives: made for a more challenging and interesting experience. Also nice to see the tutorial and other support information in the game.

Thanks for the positive feedback! I spent a some time trying to get the levels to have steady progression as well as have them playable. I put the Tutorial and more detailed support information into the game because of people getting really confused on my past PyWeek and Ludum Dare projects, so that was something very well needed.

ntoll

I really enjoyed playing this game. It's a great puzzler / coordination problem. Nice and simple yet effective..!

Thanks for the positive feedback!

speedlimit35

very nice feel, lag between levels. how to package? its so hard???!

When you say lag between levels do you mean the loading and intro screen? I don't see why you would need to package unless you were on Linux, because that's the only distro I didn't make. When you say it's hard do you mean the game is hard or are you continuing your previous statement of how to package it? Nevertheless, thank you for the feedback.

Unicorn Markets

Reminded me of the NetLogo traffic simulation. Although, unfortunately I didn't find it very fun. Screens took a while to load and the flow seemed like it hadn't been tested enough.

I probably shouldn't have added a loading screen. Nowhere on the screen does it say it's loading and it's really just annoying. I did spend a little time testing levels but I agree and I probably should've tested them a little more. Thanks for feedback!

mauve

The cars are cute; I especially liked it when darkness fell and they turned on their headlights. The horn sounds really add to the urgency.

It's a difficult game! I kept messing up and causing pile ups. I found that when you cause a crash it's hard to unpick it without causing loads more crashes.

I agree that it's pretty difficult to clear crashes without causing more. Usually I would've just turned all the lights red until it was all clear, but I understand that you didn't have that much time to do that in all the levels. Thanks for the positive feedback!

coen

Nice idea - elegant

One small glitch: On Linux I had to rename Horn.wav to horn.wav to get it to work (files taken from the repo)

Yeah I should've caught the Linux glitch. At least I didn't get any DNWs for it. Thanks for the feedback!

rdb

Creative application of the theme, and overall fairly well-polished game (though some music and less jarring bleep sounds would have been nice). The clickboxes were a bit confusing at first and I opened traffic in both directions by accident more than once (but part of that is probably that it was a tiny window on my high-DPI display). It was fun to play around with for a while, but it feels like the core gameplay might need to be extended with a bit more for it to be even more fun.

For some reason I always forget about music until the last minute and then I forget to add it. I probably should've edited the horn sound to be a little less sudden and less aggressive. I agree with the statement that the clickboxes were confusing, I couldn't find a really good way to do it, you probably could've made it fullscreen to make it easier to see and click, but I still could improve that. I tried to add 3 different modes to extend the gameplay a little bit, but I probably could've done a couple of more levels. Thanks for the feedback!

arifsch

Nice traffic simulation. Very intuitive controls for switching the traffic lights. It's quite fun to optimize the traffic flow.

Thanks for the positive feedback!

asrp

Has the filename case sensitivity issue where the filename in the source doesn't match the case of the actual filename.

pygame.error: Unable to open file './sfx/horn.wav'

Good execution. I'm not too sure how to beat the later levels though. The different light conditions was a nice touch.

I probably should test Linux next time. Later levels required a bit of thinking and decision making. Thanks for the positive feedback!

wezu

Simple concept, good execution, fun to play - occasionally all lights turn green on a junction at the same time, not sure if that's my missclick, a feature or a bug.

Opening all of the traffic was a probably a miss click, oddly a feature, and unfortunately a bug. Either way, thanks for the positive feedback.

chrisyan2000

The game was fun and provided quite a few game modes. However the controls are a little too uncomfortable, it would be great if you can use the numpad as shortcut keys for the traffic lights. I didn't see much creativity in this game as traffic flow appears to be one of the most common theme here. The production is fine, the background music and certain strange animations are a little disturbing.

I really like the idea of using the numpad as shortcut keys, except that my keyboard doesn't have a numpad to test on. I don't understand what you mean by strange animations, unless it's the one where cars start and stop repetitively behind a bus, then I understand. Thank you for the feedback!

Road Rage's success outside of PyWeek

Some of you might know that Road Rage has an itch.io page. After posting it around the internet for a bit, it gained a lot of popularity. As of today, Road Rage has 230+ views and 190+ downloads on itch.io. On October 29th it was the most popular game made with pygame on itch.io, and even made the list of New and Popular games for a brief period of time. I'm very happy with the results that I got from it as well as the results I got from here.

Yet again I'm really happy that I get to compete in PyWeek, it is both fun and challenging and every time I learn ways I can improve. Thanks for a great PyWeek, and I'll see you all in 6 months.

• Out of bounds bugs.
• Performance.
• "When swimming against current it's kind of random what direction key you must use" and "the controls sometimes seem to steer in the opposite direction" - I strongly suspect these players were using the manual camera mode, where the direction an arrow key takes you depends on which direction you're pointing the camera. I can easily imagine controlling both at the same time is hard for many players. It might be best to force automatic camera mode for some parts.
• "The whirlpool part was frustrating, especially because I didn't realize that you could get the fish food by swimming closer instead of trying to jump above the hole." - In this case putting the fish food around the first whirlpool instead of the last one would have let you experiment faster.
• "that puzzle level... I think you needed something that could be done and undone to make it more puzzly" - absolutely, this was planned, we just ran out of time here. I suspect most people had to skip this section, so maybe it should have been cut entirely.

"The boss level... was not challenging" vs "I couldn't figure out the octopus". I agree the boss could use some tweaking. Right now the tentacles are just there for decoration, but they could be actual hazards. There's no health meter or way to die, and this was done as a stopgap to deal with the lack of save function, but I kind of like it. I wonder if there's a good way to add a challenge without requiring a lose condition. Perhaps  have a timer that closes drains you've opened after a time. Any other ideas are welcome.

It seems like most people didn't find a need to bother with the core water pressure mechanic, which I understand (although I'm surprised if you managed to beat the puzzle without paying attention to the pressure). I was worried this would happen and I tried hard to force players to watch the pressure level in the tutorial, but I didn't really succeed. There may be a way to salvage it, but ultimately I think this mechanic doesn't work 100%, and I would replace it with something slightly different. I don't have any great ideas, though.

I don't think we really made any mistakes in choosing this mechanic, it just never quite came together despite several iterations. It happens sometimes in PyWeek!

Now, about navigation. This is a very important topic for me. There were mixed responses in how difficult the game was when it came to finding your way. Ranging from "playing the game properly would require lots of notes and graph paper to plot out where you are", to "the game just solved itself". Overall, though, it does seem like a little more help not getting lost would have improved things.

To review, the game has six sections: a tutorial, four challenges that can be completed in any order, and a final boss challenge. They're all connected by a large room in the center of the map. I wonder whether people were having more trouble finding their way through each section, or finding their way between sections (e.g. knowing where to go next). But each section is fairly linear so I tend to suspect the latter. I'm glad I spent time getting the minimap and main map working, because I think they both help keeping track of how the different sections connect, but what more could be done? Two ideas I have are closing off paths to challenges that have been completed, and putting a label on the minimap showing what area you're currently in.

My big question is whether having one large connected world contributed to the disorientation. We could easily have made the game six separate levels that you select from a menu, but I really like making a single seamlessly-connected world whenever I can. It makes the game feel more complete somehow. None of the judges mentioned this aspect negatively or positively, so maybe it's just me. But I'm interested in what I can do to make it work.

What about appearance? One comment references Colossal Cave Adventure with "it's a maze of twisty little passages that all look alike". I'm guessing was meant negatively, so I wonder whether making the different sections have somewhat different appearances, say with different textures, would have helped. My first thought is that limited graphical range shouldn't necessarily be a problem for PyWeek. Nobody gets "lost" playing a game like Dynamite Valley or Deep Breath, even though every level has pretty much the same graphical assets. But maybe making a game where navigation is involved means also committing to more graphics.

I'd be happy to hear any further thoughts people had about this!

Big thanks to mauve for putting this on, and congratulations to the winners and everyone who entered!

I will probably add something on the screen to tell if you are hitting the points or not sometime in the near future.

As for the issues of not getting the game to run and the flickering screen, that is probably due to the fact that I am extremely inexperienced with programming.

Hopefully by next pyweek or next next pyweek, I will have a better understanding and more experience with programming and with different packages to use since I am only using pygame so far.

Thank you all for all the useful feedback and see you next pyweek!